


Journey's End

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [44]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, Gen, How Do I Tag, Jailbreaks, Series Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2018-12-18 13:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 29,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11875311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: "Well then," he said briskly, "your journey ends here."





	1. "What, how to please a woman?"

**Author's Note:**

> I had a productive writing day!

_Savoy, two years ago_

 

They hauled Aramis into the grand hall of the chateau in the early morning, when the sky was still dark. Ragged from sleep, dressed only in the shirt and drawers he’d slept in, the breeches they’d stuffed him into when they pulled him out of the narrow inn-room where they’d found him in the night… still he struggled against the hard soldiers’ hands gripping his shoulders, their feet kicking his legs forward, the speed with which they hauled him along.

If nothing else he fought to get his feet under him, to gain a little dignity.

“Your Grace,” he told the grey-haired man above him on the balcony, shaking his head to get the hair out of his eyes, “I deeply regret disturbing you at such an incommodious hour, but I truly have no idea what this is about.”

“Really?” said Victor Amadeus of Savoy, almost cheerfully. “Truly, no idea at all?”

Aramis smiled as appeasingly as he could. “I’m a simple private citizen, passing through Savoy on personal business.”

“Passing through on the secondary roads, _right_ by my family chateau. Yes, I see.”

“It’s a coincidence, nothing more. I was just travelling home, how do you even -”

“Yeah, that’s him,” said a gruff young voice.

Aramis turned his head and squinted in puzzlement at the young man in rough clothes to the side. He had wide shoulders and dark hair, a new beard, work-roughened hands… “Jacques?” he said hesitantly. “Jacques from the stables? What are you doing here?”

“My mum was from here,” Jacques said belligerently, thrusting out his chin, “and I had to pick a side.” He looked up at the Duke of Savoy. “Yeah, that’s him, Your Grace. Ever’one knew who the Survivor of Savoy was.”

“You betray the Musketeers?” Aramis said incredulously.

“No! The Musketeers betrayed _me.”_ Jacques wiped the back of his wrist against his eyes and dropped it, blinking back angry tears. “You betrayed me when you turned into _assassins._ I looked up to you, _Monsieur Aramis,_ I thought the Regiment stood for something better’n this shitty world and - and then I found out the kind of things you fine genn’lmen did when you reckoned no’n was looking. You betrayed _me.”_

Aramis quivered under the hands gripping his shoulders and arms. He looked up at Victor Amadeus of Savoy, grizzled and tough as a wild pig from the woods. “I was travelling quietly through your lands,” he said steadily. “A private citizen, nothing more.”

The Duke laughed, hands gripping the stone of the balustrade. “Tell me your mission and I might let you live. Or die more cleanly,” he said with fairness.

Aramis said nothing. He had left Agnes and her protector Madame de Chevreuse behind him, settled comfortably in Mantua with the children. Nothing good could come of pointing anyone to them… “I am a private citizen. I resigned my commission to join the church.”

“On the eve of war?” the Duke inquired. “Ha!”

Aramis twisted, almost getting free, before a punch to the small of his back took the breath out of him.

“Were you the one that marked me, I wonder?” said Victor, grey eyebrows raised in an almost friendly manner. “A blow from behind, such a cowardly attack, befitting of the King’s Musketeers.”

“You were gutting a fifteen year old _boy,”_ Aramis roared. “You wanted me to wait until you were free to make a pretty duel of it?”

“I have no mercy for assassins,” Victor said levelly. “One puts them down like the mad dogs they are.” Aramis surged against the hands on him and almost broke free. One of the soldiers gripping him cuffed him on the side of the head. “Do you have anything else to add?”

Blearily Aramis’ eyes searched the great hall and stopped briefly at a flicker of yellow - the quilted satin dressing-gown of a black-haired woman standing high in the hall in a dainty minstrel’s gallery, her eyes dark and secret. She held her son against her, hiding the little boy’s face in her robe and covering his ears.

Aramis met the Duke’s eyes. “I have nothing more to add.”

“Well then,” said Victor briskly, “Your journey ends here. Ah, put him with the other.” Behind him, Aramis saw the Duchess frown, puzzled, but Victor continued, “If any of his _friends_ come looking, we’ll deal with them, too.” He clapped his hands. “Well move it - I have things to do with my day.”

They hauled Aramis out, into darkness, and threw him into a pit, in darkness.

 

**

 

_Savoy, now_

 

“Easy does it,” murmured Porthos as d’Artagnan lifted the grated lid out from among the flagstones of the chateau courtyard. “You have to keep your hands soft, just like picking a pocket. Or pleasing a woman.”

“I have learned so many dodgy things hanging out with you heroes,” the Gascon said, very dry.

“What, how to please a woman?” Porthos grinned as he took the grate silently and placed it deep in the shadows of the wall. "I don't hear Constance complaining." He payed out a length of fine, strong rope into the hole, and checked that his companion had the shuttered thieves-lantern strung on his belt. “Ready?”

“We could have waited for a better briefing from Aramis.”

“You really think he’d’ve given it?”

“Ohh,” d’Artagnan breathed, “it was _just fiiiiiiiine._ Beatings only on the second Tuesday of the month and iced sherbets when he was good.” He checked the fit of his tight leather gloves, the grip of them against the rope, stamped boots as soft as gloves on the flags. “Was it the crack on the head that made him so -” he waved his hand in an irritable circle - “or travelling with that woman for a year?”

“I’m starting to think,” Porthos said slowly, “that he was always a bit like that. It’s easier to fool someone who wants to be fooled.” His mouth twisted, then he shook himself. “Whatever’s down in ‘hell’, it’s something that _matters_ to him. So…”

It was quiet in the courtyard - a soft whickering of horses from the stables at the far end, the occasional cough of bored guards. They’d chosen a time when the area they worked in was sunk in blackness - as safe as they were ever going to get. “You going to be alright?” he asked d’Artagnan.

The Gascon grinned, bumping knuckles against Porthos’. “You know me, I’m always fine.” He gathered up the rope and eased down into the stinking hole. His voice floated up. _“Just don’t leave me down here.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... more plot! Yayy!
> 
> I truly hope you enjoy what I've written, and I welcome comments, but, er, please don't poke me to update faster. Plotty bits are harder to assemble into workable chapters, is the thing, and I'm writing as quickly as I can.
> 
> So! Enjoy!


	2. "He weren't best polite."

_the Franco-Spanish border, three months ago_

 

_“Who goes there?”_

Out of the heated summer night a deep-voiced man called, “Your Auntie Flo’, come for a visit.”

The freckled sentry on the picket-line called, “That isn’t the pass-phrase.”

“Oh, give it a rest,” said the deep-voiced man. “I’ve been on detached duty. Very detached. It’s never young Auberic?”

Crickets chirped. Auberic’s Adam’s Apple worked in his throat as he raised his musket to his shoulder. He was very young. “Stand and identify yourself!”

“I’m too old for this, that’s what I am.”

A lean brown hand pushed the musket barrel down as d’Artagnan, himself lean and brown, raised his voice. “I think maybe you owe me ten pistoles after that horse-race in Dieppe.”

In the dark, the big man called, “Five! Five pistoles!”

D’Artagnan grinned, flashing white teeth, a knot that he’d carried inside his chest for two weeks unloosening. “Can’t blame a lad for trying. Come in, Porthos.”

His friend loomed out of the darkness, swathed in a nondescript cloak with his head wrapped in a sloppy turban. He cocked one scarred eyebrow at the sentry, then folded his arms around d’Artagnan, cloak and all, kissing him sloppily on the cheek. “I owe you one from the missus,” he muttered conspiratorially.

D’Artagnan took the kiss in good part and held Porthos for a long time, pretending he did not feel his friend’s large frame tremble. Or maybe that was himself.

“Is my squad back yet?” Porthos asked.

“Their legs aren’t so long,” said d’Artagnan, grinning. “Let’s get you some grub. Been walking a while?”

“Yeah,” said Porthos, sighing. “Feels good to stop.”

Later, in Athos’ command tent, after the bustle and liquor of the Regiment welcoming back their boisterous lost lamb, Porthos and Athos sat quietly and talked of his capture, and his escape.

“I saw Aramis,” Porthos said, putting the statement out as neat as setting a small metal sphere with a tail of hissing gunpowder on the table.

Athos didn’t even blink.

“Was he well?” he asked, retrieving a bottle of hoarded brandy from his chest.

“He weren’t best polite,” said Porthos, grinning, “chucked me off a castle wall like I was a little birdy.” He chuckled. But his smile dropped off his face soon enough, and he held his hand over his stomach as if holding close a bleeding wound. The corners of his eyes showed tense wrinkles as he said, “Athos. He saved my life, Athos.”

His Captain looked at him, worried. Hesitantly, Athos put his hand on Porthos’ shoulder and squeezed.

“He was dressed Spanish,” said Porthos, meeting Athos’ eyes. “Knew his way around the fortress. It was like pulling teeth out of a chicken, getting answers out of our boy.”

“But he saved your life.”

“Eventually. When he was done with his other chores.” Porthos forced a smile. “You know how he gets when he’s in a mood… all catty. Why does he -” he broke off.

“Can you tell me from the beginning?” Athos asked very gently. “Everything he said.

Breathless and high, Porthos said, “He saved my life.”

“Alright.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now_

 

D’Artagnan lowered himself down the slender rope into the pit. His eyes, adjusted to the night, were useless down here. A few feet down he locked his ankles around the rope and hung there silent, listening. It was quiet, the few noises from above already muted. The cold air was still against his face - he might be in a tunnel or a vast tomb for all he could tell. After a breath he shrugged to himself and opened the shutter of his lantern one-handed, to show circular walls around him, lined in brick, an arched roof. He directed the tiny light downwards, and eventually found rubbled ground. Another breath and he shifted the kerchief around his neck over his mouth and nose.

He slid further, and kicked himself free above a bit of pottery set below the grate - this far down he could not see the stars. Pointing his light he moved to one wall and began to circle the area methodically, stepping over a neat stack of leg and arm bones, passing by the painfully carved inscription, _Rodrigo ama Ferdinando,_ and a column of gouges in the bricks, climbing over his head.

Rustle. Chink.

D’Artagnan froze.

“You took your time.” Silence. “Aramis. Paying old debts, hm? Does your head still ache? Or are you done whining… _waa, waa, it hurts, dominie…”_

It was a withered voice, fragile and drifting as desiccated leaves, unchancy as a rusted anchor. D’Artagnan fought back the chills crawling up and down his spine and gripped his lantern, directing the focused light along the wall to the voice.

“Forgotten your words again? Come here, Aramis! Stand! Walk! _Speak,_ boy!”

D’Artagnan’s light found the speaker, then, a huddle of rags and greasy, horse-long hair. The old man flinched from the light, lifting hands curled into claws with nails grown long as talons to his face, showing only one dark eye that stared at him. His voice shifted, becoming querulous. “Aramis…?”

Swallowing hard, d’Artagnan said, “I’m the rescue.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The flashback refers to events in Taken By The Collar, where Aramis did indeed rescue Porthos while being an obnoxious shit (but we know why, now).


	3. “No-one’s leaving you behind.”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Some non-graphic violence and etc. Ah... no-one thinks this is a fluffy story, right?

_Asti, south of Savoy, one year ago_

 

 _“This_ one?” Porthos asked wearily.

“How many bands of raiders can there be?” asked d’Artagnan, very dry.

“In this square mile? Let me figure some sums.”

On his belly on the grassy rise, set so that his head was hidden in the tall grass, Porthos brooded unhappily at the small camp, of Spanish, probably - lean, and mean, and ready to fight. They wouldn’t be easy…

Beside him d’Artagnan froze, his small brass spyglass still set to his eye. “Porthos, you’re never going to believe this.”

“In many things, I have faith,” Porthos said lightly, aping a missing friend. D’Artagnan just shoved the glass into his hand. He raised it to his own scarred eye, careful that it would not catch the last light from the setting sun… and he stiffened.

“I’m not just imagining things,” d’Artagnan breathed beside him. “Short hair, civilian clothes, tied to a pole…”

“Looks like Aramis to me.”

“What is he _doing_ here…?”

“We’ll just have to go in and ask him.”

**

Aramis let his head drop back against the pole with a discreet thunk and reflected on his latest sunset. So pretty it had been, with vivid colours and an ebullient flow of passing clouds, bloody but beautiful. It was the sixth in his memory, and he savoured each as one new come to very good wine. Sunrises were also precious treasures which he had made a determined point of being awake for, whatever else his business, and in his heart of hearts he could admit to himself that he’d rather been hoping to see a seventh before his travels came to a halt.

The little camp darkened, its shadows broken by a bonfire, the light of that broken by passing soldiers settling down for the night. Some were eating boiled grain and beans from an iron pot, three others tried to knock each others’ heads off in the manner of cheerful young men everywhere, an older soldier snapped at them in rapid Spanish and they hung their heads and moved away… They were beating the Piedmontese again.

The luckless wight had almost stopped crying at the blows from the officer interrogating him. He had long since ceased giving coherent answers to any questions barked his way but hung loose in his own bonds, his curly hair, draggled with blood, hiding his eyes. The officer, with an impressive hooked nose and a fierce moustache exclaimed in exasperation and drew a heavy iron pistol from his belt. The Piedmontese scarcely moved, only his head turning to watch Señor Mostacho’s gun.

So… sunsets.

Hands touched his wrists, bound with a bit of coarse rope behind him. “Can you walk?” a low gruff voice whispered. In French, interestingly enough.

Aramis ran a quick inventory of his limbs and parts: headache, crick in his back from sitting awkwardly, a deep solid ache of bruises from a beating he had himself received. He didn’t think anything was broken. “Yes,” he answered, also in French.

The rope that bound him tugged back and forth as fingers tried to untie it, then there was a brief oath and he heard the unsheathing of a knife, the hissing rasp as it sawed into the rope.

Another, younger voice asked, “Whatever are you doing here?”

“Contemplating my sins and hoping for supper,” he answered softly, grinning. (He truly didn’t know. The Spanish had picked him up on the road and he didn’t know why - was it something he said? Some way he looked? The wrong road? He’d been out in the world less than a week and already it was proving an unchancy and dire place… But beautiful, so very beautiful.)

Monsieur Étoffé, his voice warm and solid and with a laugh hiding in it, asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have seen a treaty lying about, would you?”

Aramis blinked. “The Mantuan papers? The lady has them.”

“What lady?”

He shrugged, in a manner that would have been expressive if his conversational partners had been able to see it. “I don’t know. A lady. That’s what the young fellow over there said. They want to know which way she went.”

There was a sigh behind him.

Hesitantly he said, “Does this mean you’ll be rescuing him instead? I’m sure I can be helpful too.” He’d never met the man. They’d never talked even in their brief, shared captivity; he bore the Piedmontese no ill will and indeed, would like to help him. But he’d be damned if he was left here. “I have many skills, friends, I can -”

“You idiot,” the Monsieur Étoffé said gruffly, “no-one’s leaving you behind.” The rope-sawing stopped and his hand was squeezed.

“Well then,” he said, relieved, and gripped back. “There’s a powder store on the other side of the camp, if a distraction would be useful.”

“On it,” said Monsieur Jeune, and disappeared.

The Piedmontese was looking at him over Señor Mostacho’s shoulder as the officer ranted. His dark eyes watched as Aramis’ hands came free and his arms inadvertently loosened and dropped. Aramis stared at him wishing - silence? peace? freedom? - he met the young man’s eyes.

Señor Mostacho threw up his hands in exasperation, and he started to turn. And the Piedmontese took a breath and began to swear, in fluent Italian and disreputable Spanish, he swore and insulted and jeered, until all the attention of the Spanish soldiers were on him, some laughing, some angry, and Aramis slipped, with one of Monsieur Étoffé's hands supporting his arm, into the darkness.

He spared a look back as he reached the brow of the rise that the big man steered him to, just in time to see Señor Mostacho raise the gun to head height and fire. And he swore to remember the Piedmontese in his prayers, every night - every sunset - blessed are the little mercies… A great force moved behind him as implacable as the hand of God, and he knew nothing more.

**

Porthos glared at d’Artagnan as the younger man, sooty and rumpled, crawled breathless into the little hollow where he hid with Aramis. “That wasn’t a distraction, that explosion was a bloody holocaust.”

D’Artagnan shrugged, unrepentant. _“I’m_ distracted.” He stared carefully down at Aramis. “How is he?”

“He got clipped by flying debris,” said Porthos sourly. “I’d say he’s distracted too.” He patted Aramis’ face anxiously, but the man didn’t move.

Quietly d’Artagnan added, “That other prisoner, there’s no point going back for him.”

Porthos crossed himself, chewed his lower lip, then said, “Get Aramis on a horse; we need to move.”

The unchancy clouds, which had painted the sunset so red, started to rain.

 

**

 

_Savoy, hell, now_

 

D’Artagnan circled the brick-walled cell, checking for openings, checking for other prisoners. He just… didn’t take the old man’s word that he was the only one there. Then he ushered the foul-tongued bag of bones to the centre and got him to lift his arms. (He assumed it was a rescue that Aramis had in mind, not an assassination. They could work out the details when everyone was free and clear.)

He knotted the dangling rope securely around the old man’s torso and tugged it firmly three times. (Was this the ‘devil’ then? He _looked_ like a devil, raddled and wicked and trapped, his brilliant eyes glaring like jewels fallen from Lucifer’s crown.) And the rope began to tauten as from above Porthos, reading his signal in the twitches of the rope, put his back into it and lifted.

The old man stifled a cry as the rope lifted him off his feet and the pull of it straightened his spine; he stared at d’Artagnan all the time he was lifted upwards until he met the neck of the oubliette and disappeared upwards.

D’Artagnan dusted off his hands - all going well so far - and waited for the rope to come down again.

And waited.

And then heard a soft, _soft_ chink, as the grate covered over the opening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _And then heard a soft, _soft_ chink, as the grate covered over the opening._ \- At least he didn’t say “What could possibly go wrong?” _out loud_ or anything silly like that.
> 
> // _Señor Mostacho, Monsieur Jeune, Monsieur Étoffé,_ \- Mr Moustache, Mister Young, and, if Google Translate does not fail me, 'Étoffé' can mean 'substantial, rich, well-rounded' (as well as fabric *shrug*)
> 
> **
> 
> // _“Get Aramis on a horse; we need to move.” The unchancy clouds, which had painted the sunset so red, started to rain._ \- For readers who started this series somewhere in the middle (or if it's just been a while), this leads directly into a flashback in the Kindness of Strangers here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6470281/chapters/14941642
> 
> which is slightly expanded on in Girl Talk, here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/8329804/chapters/24218607
> 
> and after _that_ the next time Aramis sees Porthos and d'Artagnan is in Venice III, here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/5196635
> 
> (The conversation doesn't go so well.)


	4. "A poor host."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the scarcity of forward movement, here. I hope there are things to enjoy in any case.

_several weeks ago, the French military encampment_

 

“Thank the Good God,” Athos heard behind him, and turned, half-buried in the wet shirt he’d been trying to peel off in the solitude and shadows of his command tent. "You're Athos," Aramis said, eyes wide.

Athos shut his eyes, and opened them. He pinched the bridge of his nose briefly, in the hopes that matters would become more clear. "Yes," he said, "I am."

"It is really quite complicated to explain," said Aramis, standing still as a column of black marble in his wrapped-up cloak, as unlooked for as a spectre at a feast though, Athos hoped, more lucky.

“Could you try?” Athos asked. Screaming at him for answers outside in the rain had been... less than productive.

“I don’t remember you.”

“Ah?” Athos said in response, for lack of anything better. To fill the silence he tugged irritably at the clinging fabric on his arms and Aramis’ eyes flicked to the side - an old, familiar tic from his early days in the Regiment, when Athos’ habits of modesty had earned him much cheerful mockery from the less-austerely raised soldiers. Except Aramis. It had been a small courtesy, unremarked-on, yet Athos had appreciated it all the same.

“Mostly I don’t remember you,” Aramis amended, while Athos hauled his second-best shirt over his head. “There are a few bits and pieces.” He flashed a quick, nervous smile. “I had a knock on the head, I think.”

“Ahhh.” That… that made some measure of sense, he supposed. “How did you come here, then?”

“A wandering mender of stockings gave me directions,” Aramis said cheerfully. “Wonderful people for knowing where to go, stocking-darners.”

 _“Aramis,”_ Athos chided.

“I’m… _really_ not good at answering questions, Captain,” his old friend answered, meeting his eyes. Athos put his hand on Aramis’ shoulder and - even through the bulk of the cloak - felt the odd quietness of him, balanced and waiting to move. The springing, sparking energy he used to carry was absent, and the relaxed warmth of Aramis’ casual embraces… the closest Athos could describe it was the stillness of an animal brought to bay, poised between surrender and violence. Athos stepped back.

He made a show at looking at his palm, damp from Aramis’ cloak. “I’ve dry clothes to lend, if you want them.”

“I thank you, Captain,” said Aramis, though he didn’t move, still and upright in the centre of the tent.

Athos turned and rummaged in his clothes press, for his third-best shirt (cleanish) and a serviceable pair of leather breeches. “It is a poor host,” he said to the canvas wall, “whose guest remains standing.” He held out the clothes, not looking, until they were taken out of his hand, and shuffled his belongings pointlessly until the rustling behind him stopped.

Aramis was still standing, though in dry clothes now. (Christ! but he was thin, thin as a horse worked too hard, too long.) His hair dripped onto his shoulders and his feet, bare now, looked unexpectedly pale and delicate against the dark woolen rug that floored that part of the tent. He fingered the rough darn on one shoulder, considering it. His black-lashed eyes lifted. “Are you between batmen?”

“King’s Musketeers don’t keep servants, as a general rule,” Athos replied.

“Hm. I could fix the shirt for you,” Aramis said seriously.

Athos gave a laugh that was more of a sob. “You used to. You never had a good word to say about my housekeeping.”

“One must have _standards,”_ Aramis declared, as he had a thousand times before, “we are not _animals,”_ and Athos threw back his head and cackled.

When he had his breath back Aramis was still watching him, held tilted curiously. “What are you thinking, Captain?”

“I think that you have travelled a hard road.”

Aramis grinned, then, half-savage, half-gleeful. “It’s amazing what a man can endure.”

“Even so.” Athos hesitated. “Welcome home, Aramis.” Even as he said it the man twitched his head in an irritable tic, not of negation but weariness. In the dim light his skin was growing chalky under the tan - Athos wondered if he could steer him to the cot he kept in the back for late nights…

“I’m not weak!” Aramis snapped, following his gaze to the bedding.

“Of course not,” Athos answered blandly. “But Porthos may be some time.”

“Who is…?”

Athos felt his lips twitch. “Welcome home, Aramis.”

 

**

 

_now, Savoy, the woods_

 

Athos held himself still for a moment, thinking.

He could hear cannon firing, down at the chateau, and, when he crawled to a rise he could see the little pinpricks of light from the two high walls that were in view, as the big guns barked like brass watch dogs.

He was simply too far away to affect that developing situation right now… and there was Aramis to consider.

His friend lay on a pallet by the fire, his breathing slow and deep in the true sleep to which, exhausted, he’d dropped after the unconsciousness which Athos had choked him to. At any other time Athos would be glad he was resting.

They’d made agreements, he and Porthos and d’Artagnan. Athos drummed anxious fingers on his thigh, and then moved, quick and sure.

He lit the thieves-lanterns they’d brought, wedging thick squat candles securely inside next to the curved mirrors that focused their light, and shut their little doors so only a scrap of light escaped them. Then he covered the camp-fire with loose earth. Patting Aramis’ cheek he tried to wake him but… no. _Be sure your sins will find you out,_ he thought to himself, sourly. He hauled the man a little way into the darkness - behind the fallen tree there was a hollow, with enough space for one, perhaps two, to lie, and he tucked the both of them in there, pulling branches over and keeping the lanterns nearby. It was unthinkable to let Aramis wake up in darkness.

With luck, if any searchers in the woods found this place, hidden in a hollow of the land as it was, they might think it empty. Athos did not trust to luck. He would leave to lay a false trail and draw away attention if he must, he knew - but… that wasn’t a good option. His friends were competent men. They knew what they were doing. Probably lying low until the fuss went away. Probably.

Was that dogs he could hear, in between the cannon?

Athos guarded his friend’s sleep and waited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _“Are you between batmen?”_ \- a ‘batman’ (as well as the iconic superhero) is a plain soldier who, in addition to his other duties, keeps an officer’s baggage in order. In a divergence from book canon we never see the Inseperables with personal servants and, while they have dedicated stablemen (Hi, Jacques!), we see even Treville shovel horse-shit in his time. So I’m positing that part of the general custom of the Regiment is for the commissioned soldiers to do as much of the daily chores as possible. (Which would make other cavalry units, recruited from the nobility and the merchant class, side-eye them constantly, but they’re also the most lethal group out there so no-one says anything in earshot.)
> 
> // The flashback fills in a small gap in the first chapter of Kindness of Strangers.


	5. "What have you done?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // There’s so little fanon for Adele that I have this odd feeling of both freedom and hacking my way through wild country with a machete, carving my own roads. It’s fun!

_Paris, several years ago_

 

“I am never going to apologise for liking powerful people,” Adele said frankly, kicking her booted foot against the wall.

“My house has glass walls,” answered Aramis, “I cannot cast pebbles at you on that account. Cherry?” He offered her the little punnet of bright red fruit and, when she had picked one out with her slender fingers, took one of his own, tucking the juicy little globe into his mouth and rolling it on his tongue. He turned his head and discreetly spat the stone into his palm, setting it neatly beside another on the edge of the roof on which they both sat.

“Your choices are your own,” he said, gazing out over the city, painted in indigo and rose in the newborn dawn. It was the roof-edge of Adele’s theatre they sat on - the _jeu de paume_ court, that is, where her company acted their plays twice a week, squeezing a narrow stage of colour and wit into a space more often meant for sweat and rough activity.

He kicked his own booted feet against the wall.

“I just -” he sighed. “The Cardinal?”

She looked at him, her pale face amused. “Yes, the Cardinal.” She ate another cherry and mused, “Doors open for me as his mistress that don’t for a comic actress. Maybe I’ll see you at one of your pretty little salons, one day.”

He winced slightly, then at a nudge from her elbow took another cherry, tucking it into his cheek as he said, “I just don’t like him.”

She cackled, shrugging deeper into the rich velvet cloak wrapped around her. “No King’s Musketeer likes him, it’s part of your regimental oath.”

“Now that is truly unfair, Adele: we all of us, individually, come to our odium within a month with no outside urging required. It is a wonderful addition to our _esprit de corp.”_ He spat the stone as she giggled, and put it beside the others, nudging all three of them absently with his forefinger.

“He’s so _clever,”_ she burst out, all of a sudden. “I like clever. Have you heard him talk? I mean, really talk?” He looked at her, eyebrows quirked, and she elbowed him again. “Don’t be like that.” Holding her gaze he took another cherry, defiantly. She giggled and took one of her own.

“Maybe this one will be the last,” she said after a time. “A permanent patron with pots of money, who can set me up with a nice house and enough jewels to live on comfortably whatever else happens… I could stop after that, if I wanted.”

“You would get bored,” he declared, “so very, very, _very_ bored…”

She purred comfortably in her throat. “I’ll take that chance.”

“Are we still friends?” he asked her mildly, looking out over the wakening city.

“Course we are,” she said, and tugged his ear so that he looked at her. She kissed his nose. “Always.”

They ate the last of the cherries.

 

**

 

_Savoy, the campsite_

 

Aramis’ eyelids opened a bare slit. There was a little light nearby - a faint glow from an almost shuttered lantern. He lay still a moment longer, listening, but there was nothing but the normal stirrings of wildlife in a dark wood. He tested his limbs quietly - they seemed sound enough though his head ached and his throat felt swollen and raw. Branches in bundles lay over him like a wild blanket, in the dark hidden hollow in which he lay. _“Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all,”_ he muttered to himself ruefully

Secretly, silently, he eased himself out.

The campsite was near deserted. Most of the horses were still there - he rubbed Athos’ black horse Roger’s muzzle affectionately and felt him lip at his hair. Porthos’ Jupiter shouldered in to have his neck scratched under his mane. Some of the baggage had been stirred about; the fire was doused with loose earth.

 _“He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of a wilderness,”_ Aramis quoted thoughtfully. _“He encircled him, He cared for him, He guarded him as the apple of His eye…_ Athos, what have you done?”

 

**

 

_Savoy, outside the chateau_

 

At the high gates Athos looked up, and up, and blinked owlishly. “Are these my lodgings?” he said with the earnestness of a very drunk man, his aristocratic French both drawling and beautifully enunciated. He turned with exaggerated caution to the men in the sturdy leather of foresters that had chosen to ‘escort’ him to the Duke’s residence and, with a blissful smile embraced one of them, enveloping them both in the reek of strong alcohol. The forester froze, his nose wrinkling. He had no French.

“I’m sure they’ll find you somewhere… appropriate to stay,” said another.

Athos beamed at him. “You’re so nice,” he declared, opening his doublet to bare his linen-clad chest and fumble inside the garment. The men beside him tensed, but then Athos retrieved a small silver flask. “Drink?”

“Uh -”

Another of the party hammered on a little wicket in the main gate and it swung open.

“I’m so happy you _found_ me,” Athos said plaintively, “I was worried I’d never get out of the woods. Fir tree, fir tree, another fir tree. Mountains just everywhere. How does one see where to go? Please,” he said, pressing the flask into the dour man’s weather-worn hands, “a small gift for my saviours.”

“Uh -”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _My house has glass walls_ -  
>  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_who_live_in_glass_houses_should_not_throw_stones
> 
> // _Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all_ \- Matthew 5.15
> 
> // _He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of a wilderness; He encircled him, he cared for him, He guarded him as the pupil of His eye._ \- Deuteronomy 32:10
> 
> // _the jeu de paume court, that is, where her company acted their plays twice a week_ \- If anyone’s interested…
> 
>   _The early theatres in Paris were often placed in existing structures like tennis courts; their stages were extremely narrow, and facilities for sets and scene changes were often non-existent (this would encourage the development of the unity of place). Eventually, theatres would develop systems of elaborate machines and decors, fashionable for the chevaleresque flights of knights found in the tragicomedies of the first half of the century._  
> 
> _In the early part of the century, the theatre performances took place twice a week starting at two or three o'clock. Theatrical representations often encompassed several works, beginning with a comic prologue, then a tragedy or tragicomedy, then a farce and finally a song. Nobles sometimes sat on the side of the stage during the performance. Given that it was impossible to lower the house lights, the audience was always aware of each other and spectators were notably vocal during performances. The place directly in front of the stage, without seats—the "parterre"—was reserved for men, but being the cheapest tickets, the parterre was usually a mix of social groups. Elegant people watched the show from the galleries. Princes, musketeers and royal pages were given free entry. Before 1630, an honest woman did not go to the theatre._
> 
> from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_France


	6. "Mad, bad bastard."

_Paris, many years ago_

 

“Do you trust me?” the fop asked, dropping an iron ball down the long barrel of his arquebus and ramming it briskly with the rod. There was lace on his collar, fancy, more’n a man could afford on Musketeer wages. From this distance Porthos could not smell his perfume, only gunpowder, hay, earth, and the wooden post against his back, the sweetness of shattered fruit.

With a brassy grin, Porthos took his black leather hat back from another recruit, Thierry, and held it in front of his heart. “I trust you not to get a hole in my hat.” He gestured peremptorily and Thierry plucked a large red-green apple from the bushel-basket beside him and set it on his head.

“Last one,” Porthos said, keeping his voice cheerful as Thierry backed quickly away. He was calculating the odds of a tenth shot flying true - even a good gun had its randomness built into the barrel, and some balls were molded irregular and no-one cared ’cause guns were for shooting _en masse,_ at a charge. And - the baby-faced pretty-boy marksman had to run out of luck sooner or later. But damned if Porthos was going to show fear at this stage of the game.

“No more?” the fop asked in disappointment, his fingers caressing the barrel of his gun with the grace others might a lover.

“The rest are for my midnight snack,” Porthos said, still grinning. It was a weak joke, but most of the crowd around them chuckled. (They were young, for the most part, recent recruits as new to their commissions as Porthos himself. Not as snooty as he’d thought they’d be, but… a bit of shock and awe never went amiss, some flash and sparkle to distract from his shaky horsemanship and rough accent, his lack of finesse with foil and pistol. Let them remember that he’d earned a place here.)

“Do you trust me?” the fop asked again, his black, almond-shaped eyes very bright, wild and fearless. “Porthos, isn’t it? Do you trust me?”

“Yeah,” he said, setting his feet and letting his weight sink into the ground. “I trust you not to kill me on purpose.”

The corner of the fop’s mouth curled slightly, and he hefted the gun and sighted down it. He -

 _“ARAMIS RENE D’HERBLAY!!”_ roared Captain Treville from the balcony overlooking the garrison yard.

The fop whirled, looking startled, startled and guilty, setting his arquebus over his shoulder as he did so. But - sloppily - his finger was still on the trigger, and as he turned it fired with a cheerful flare of sound and flame and smoke.

Porthos froze against the post. In the breathless silence after the gun’s crack shards of sticky, sweet, juicy fruit scattered over his shoulders. Still breathless, he lifted his black hat from his chest and made a show of examining it for holes. The young men around them started to cheer, then fled, cowed by the Captain’s grim glare. The fop - Aramis - slunk up the stairs and disappeared into Treville’s office.

He appeared again a half hour later, chastened as if he’d had a brief tour of Hell, but spared a brief flashing grin as Porthos offered half a hat’s worth of money.

“Same time next week?” Porthos asked, bumping him with his shoulder.

“I swore I’d stop,” said Aramis, his voice very small. “Treville got a little bible to swear on and everything.” His long fingers gripped the edge of the table they sat at. “I didn’t know he even _had_ a bible…” This close, Porthos could smell the perfume again, rich in amber and musk, wafting from his pretty hair. His eyes slid to spy Porthos from under his lashes, secret and sly. “Your turn, next time.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, the chateau, now_

 

Porthos could smell the stables, and the whickering shuffle of horses in the dark. He peered through a crack in the solid wooden door at the alarms and excursions in the courtyard: men with torches, men with halberds, men with long guns. They'd stopped firing the cannons a while back, the flash and thunder of them gone quiet. In all that hubbub, no-one was paying any attention to the grate in the flagstones that covered the pit where he'd left d'Artagnan - it wasn't their business that had started this, he thought. He wished he'd had time to get his comrade out of there before the fuss started up.

Without sparing a glance behind him he muttered, “Any idea what this’s about?”

The old man he'd pulled out of ‘Hell’ said nothing, his stertorous breathing the only sign of his presence. A stableman they'd rousted when they hid here, disturbed from his pallet in the upper loft and intimidated into keeping still, said anxiously, “I didn't know.”

 _“We be soldiers three…”_ drifted into the torchlit courtyard , loud and cheerful.

Porthos swore to himself.

 _”We be soldiers three,”_ the song went on, with the vivacity and unconcern for pitch of a very drunken man, loud and warbling, _“Pardonnez-moi je vous en prie - lately come back from the Low Country - with never a penny of money…”_

It was a drinking song, for soldiers, that had been popular a few years back. Porthos knew it well. Athos had never sung it in his hearing, the man tended more to gloomy drunkenness and in his rare moments of merriment turned to poetry, not song. Porthos squinted through the gap in the wood and saw his Captain wobbling around the courtyard, clumsy as he had never been in his true drunkenness, doublet unbuttoned and a silver flask in his hand. He stumbled near the grate and apologised volubly and loudly, falling to his knees and vomiting on the flagstones.

“I say,” he told the men around him, fluttering in uncertainty - unsure whether to lay hands on the obvious nobleman, or chivvy the drunk, or arrest the spy - “I say, you won’t have any trouble cleaning that up, will you? I don’t want to interrupt your pheasant-hunting or whatnot.” He burped. “Is that my lodgings?” Wobbling to his feet he began another tune, a love song that Aramis used to like about hiding a little bird away in the greenwood. _“Tu-whit, tu-whoo, I’ll join you,”_ he warbled as he disappeared through one of the side doors.

"You mad, bad bastard,” Porthos muttered, half rueful, half furious. He was starting to understand Treville’s state of mind, back when he Captained the King’s Musketeers.

“Athos’s here too, then,” mumbled the stableman blurrily.

Porthos swivelled and stared at the man, barely visible in the stables - only a stub of tallow candle in a solid metal lantern to light the place. He was tall and wide shouldered, bearded, grasping a leather hat anxiously in his dirty hands. His voice was familiar… but oddly deep. Porthos remembered it as cracking.

“That’s never Jacques the stableboy?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, Jacques!


	7. "There's just one problem."

_Normandy, years ago_

 

D’Artagnan was younger, and fierce, and despite any unkindly meant comments about bandy legs, tall. He skittered up the tight winding stairs of the tumbledown tower and had almost caught up with Aramis by the time the marksman had reached the top, a bare echoing room with a charred hearth for a beacon fire in the middle. Aramis perched uneasily on the low sill of the window opening, leaning out, with his long musket cradled in his arms. “Bad angle, bad angle,” he muttered to himself. “No, not a good angle at all.” He glanced back at d’Artagnan, took off his dove-grey hat, and grinned. “Can you help, d’Artagnan?”

Chest heaving, d’Artagnan nodded, then dived forward urgently as Aramis tipped backwards out the window, the long gun in his hands. He threw his torso over the other man’s booted legs and clung to the stone for dear life, feeling the shock in Aramis’ body as he stopped falling to hang, supported by d’Artagnan’s weight on his calves. Twisting to get a better angle around a stone buttress, he set musket to hanging shoulder, sighted coolly, and fired.

A breath. The world was silent. D’Artagnan spared a look outwards and saw the barren chalky seashore, windswept, the curvetting black horses with Porthos and Athos on them, behatted and armed to the teeth, and surrounding them on a collection of mangy greys, the green-coated rebels who had been fighting them. As he watched, a small bloom of red flowered in the back of one of them and Porthos used his staggering fall to shoulder through the line of weaponry and reach Athos’ side, who took the relief of a safe flank to take the time to finish off one of his attackers with a smash of his sword-pommel. The fight went on.

When the two were done, Porthos looked up at d’Artagnan and Aramis hanging from the top of the little tower and lifted his wide-brimmed hat briefly. Aramis waved. Athos looked at them also, expressionless, before spurring on his horse.

D’Artagnan could feel the sigh reach through Aramis’ body. “That was fun,” the marksman said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

D’Artagnan sighed himself, giddy with the scrambling climb, and with relief. “There’s just one problem,” he said, dropping his chin to the stone. “Now that you’re done, Aramis. All shots fired.”

“Exceedingly well, I might add,” his friend said, passing up the musket. D’Artagnan took it awkwardly, wincing at the heat of the metal barrel against his palm, and manoeuvred it somehow over the small of his back to drop it inside the tower room. Aramis continued to dangle, held by the other Musketeer’s body weight.

“Now that you’re _done._ How do you plan on getting out from this?”

“... Ah…”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now_

 

In the profound darkness of the oubliette, d’Artagnan looked up into the blackness where the grate had covered over his way out.

The important thing was not to panic, he thought.

He still had his lantern, the candle burning strongly, and a replacement candle tucked in one of his pockets. He had _hours_ of light, bags of it. He directed his lantern light over the gouges dug into the wall - he even had a ladder. And the monster was gone from this place, it was just him, only him.

If it were safe to come out Porthos would have left him a rope, he thought.

The important thing was not to panic.

**

“What the fuck are you doing in Savoy, Jacques?” Porthos asked patiently.

Jacques stood still in the shadows, his leather hat gripped in tight-clenched hands. “My mum come fr’m here,” he said quietly. He was older and solider than when Porthos had known him, with a man’s breadth of shoulders and even a slight paunch to his belly. The filthy old man Porthos had dragged out of the oubliette stirred in the shadows and Jacques flinched. One of the horses nearby stirred, not quite spooked, and Jacques drew in a sharp breath and stilled again.

“So you work here?” Porthos said soothingly. “Hey Jacques, that’s great, that’s so very great. ‘Cause that means you can help me, and Jacques? I got a friend trapped in a pretty bad place right now and I could use any help you got.”

Jacques stared at him, transfixed.

Porthos held out his right hand, palm open. “Can you do that for me, Jacques? Can you help me?”

Jacques’ eyes flicked again to the old man then back to Porthos. Slowly, he nodded.

“You see that bitty wagon in the yard? I want you to move it so it covers the sightlines over that little grate. No-one is going to look at someone like _you,_ moving around here.”

“What _didn’t_ you know?” the old man interrupted, his voice the grate of a dead and shambling thing. His hand moved, and the light glinted off his long, horny finger nails. Jacques flinched. Porthos swore softly to himself. “Do you have something to confess, young Jacques?”

“Hey now,” Porthos interrupted, “eyes on me, Jacques.”

“I only thought they’d kill him!” the stableman burst out.

Porthos flinched himself, then forced an easy smile. “Course you did. Bet you were trying to do the right thing. You always meant well, Jacques. Remember how you stayed up all night when my horse Jupiter had the colic? He’s doing great now, Jacques, because you did the kind thing.”

“You’re not here to murder anybody?”

“Who, us? Nah. We like Savoy, yeah? We’re just here to take our stuff and go home, all quiet and neat-like.”

“You have to be quiet,” Jacques insisted. “Stay down here and don’t make a noise.”

“Course we will,” said Porthos, keeping eye contact. “And when you’ve shifted the gear, I want you to tie this rope to the top of the lid and let it dangle down, that’s all you gotta do, Jacques, just do that and don’t talk to anybody and ever’thing will be just fine.”

The stableman hesitated, agony on his face.

A rustle, from above, that wasn’t a stable cat. “Jacques?”

It was a young woman, round of face, peering through the hatch to the upper loft of the stables. Her curly dark hair dripped in a long braid over one shoulder and she curled one hand in the sleeve of a too-long linen night-rail. “Jacques, who are these?”

“Just some friends,” Jacques said insistently.

The old man folded himself into the shadows and remained silent. Porthos flung one arm over the younger man’s wide shoulders, thought of how much Jacques might have had a part in Aramis ending up in ‘Hell’, and consciously stopped his fingers gripping him hard enough to break bone. “Yeah,” he said, smiling gently. “We’re just some friends come to see our friend Jacques. We’re all friends here. Who’s the lovely lady, Jacques?”

“Marie,” the woman said. She covered her mouth with her hand and covered a yawn. “You’re not supposed to bring people here. What was that noise before?”

“Just some lads making a mess, before. You know how scrappy us young men are.” Marie chortled slightly and Porthos grinned wider. “Jacques has to go out and clean up the mess, but he’s letting us stop here a bit, to rest our legs. _Then we’ll be on our way.”_ Jacques nodded so enthusiastically his body shook. Porthos squeezed his shoulder again, to remind him of his strength, then gave him a little shove to the stable door. _“Thanks,_ Jacques. No muss no fuss, yeah?”

He watched Jacques totter across the yard, arms and legs stiff, with the coil of fine rope hidden in a bundle slung from his shoulder. He reached the wagon, set askew in the courtyard - improperly stowed - and lifted its hitching bars.

One of the soldiers hailed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I only thought they’d kill him_ \- line nicked from Anne Bonney of _Black Sails,_ which I watched the very last of last night. While I have a few issues with the plotting... damn. _That was an experience._


	8. "Do you think that you are the only one?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rapid update, but kind of short. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.
> 
> CW: the flashback deals with the social aftermath of a canon miscarriage/stillbirth (not at all gory) and period burial customs for unbaptised infants. It’s a POV flashback, not an Important Information flashback, so you can skip it if you want and start reading at _Savoy, now._ Cheers.

_Picardy, many years ago_

 

“Can I see Isabelle?” Aramis asked.

“No.”

But still Isabelle’s mother, Madame Babineaux, kept her hand on the back door. It was dark green, freshly painted over the weathered wood, and the stone walls of the house were rich with green ivy. His eyes strayed up to a high window, its green shutters firmly latched, and then back to the lady in the doorway. Behind him, chickens and geese clucked and squabbled. She hadn’t shut the door, so Aramis stayed.

She wasn’t dressed for visitors, Madame Babineaux, with her storm-grey hair drawn back in a single braid, its severity loosened by wear and the starch in her linen cap softened. Her dress was very clean, though, and she smelled strongly of soap.

“Please,” said Aramis, “I brought some good soup.” He hefted the clay jug, hot against his fingers, and smiled winningly. “She needs to keep her strength up, doesn’t she?”

“What Isabelle _needs,_ young Rene, is quiet, and rest,” Madame Babineaux said levelly. “If you truly love her, you will give her those things.”

And Aramis had been good, so good these last few months, or at least _respectable,_ saying his _pleases_ and his thank yous, not ever running among the grapevines in the pre-dawn with the dew on his bare toes or fulfilling impossible dares so the village boys would be very clear that the _actual_ reason he was different from them was because he was _better..._ He’d spent months in meekness and mildness, slowly convincing Isabelle’s parents he was good husband material despite his uncertain patrimony. She wanted him to go and so he should, but -

“The child?”

“We’re burying it tomorrow morning, at the edge of our orchard,” she said quietly, her face very calm.

“I could take her,” he offered, voice bright. “The sanctuary of respite in Liesse isn’t _that_ far. Five days, a baptism, and she can rest in the churchyard with the rest of the family.”

“Tomorrow,” Madame Babineaux said firmly. Her eyes softened in their wrinkled frame. “Some things aren’t meant to be, Rene. It’s best to let them pass simply and put them from your mind.” She touched his smooth cheek. “It’s not a bad place, by the apple trees. She - _it_ \- can rest easily.”

“But -” he cursed his voice for wobbling - “but how will we find her after, when everything else is over?”

She drew back her hand and slapped him, hard enough to rock him on his feet. “Do you think that you are the only one who grieves? The only one who has lost something?” Eyes bright he turned his face to the other side but she only touched his cheek again, with fingers that were harder to bear for their gentleness. “Rene,” she said very softly, “you can still call me _maman_ if you like.”

Aramis squared his shoulders. “I thank you, Madame Babineaux,” he said politely. Retreating half a step he offered the bottle of hot soup again. “Please,” he said, “if this would be of any use to you I beg you to take it.”

**

He climbed the ivy that night, very late, with only the full moon and the barking of a distant dog for company as he eased the green-shuttered window open.

But Isabelle was already gone - the bed stripped of blankets and the armoire emptied. The room smelt strongly of soap. In the fall of moonlight through the window he saw a bundle of white - they’d wrapped his tiny unborn daughter in the good linen.

“Well then,” he said, summoning his voice as he crouched in the frame of the window. “One young lady is absent but I hope that I may be of assistance to _you._ Would it please you to be called Estelle-Marie? We’re going on a little trip to the church at Liesse.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now, outside the chateau_

 

It galled Aramis to admit it, but they had probably been right to stop him going in before. Thinking back to the afternoon and early evening he _had_ been a little… nervous. He was better now.

Everything was bright and clear in this moment, sharp and clear as an angel standing toe-tip on the point of a silver pin. From his perch in the fir tree he looked again at the chateau - an establishment far too grand for a house and a bit too pretty for a fortress. In the great courtyard at the back, the space inside the walls where the working-life of the inhabitants was held, it was still a little busy going by the torches set up in ranks and the bright lights moving around like bees. Something had set them off… Mother-of-Christ. All was quiet in the environs outside, he was sure of it, though he could see a few glimpses of men on the walls and the four bastion-towers of the chateau-proper, cleaning and stowing the cannon that guarded it. The setting moon painted silver the multitude of towers and cupolas and chimneys that crowded the main roof. It reminded him for a brief moment of Paris at midnight.

Aramis watched the setting moon, and saluted her grandeur and the grace of her leaving.

Then he walked around to the gracious, grand front of the chateau and slipped through the shadows to the ornamented, lovely, _climbable_ wall. He tipped an imaginary hat to the gate-guards nearby, still staring out into the darkness, and began to ascend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I felt stricken with a horrible need to do more research, blast it, but am winging a lot of it. _My_ chateau is a bit like the Chateau de Chambord but smaller and lacking in a moat. (And it has all the towers.) The roof is the same, though. 
> 
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Château_de_Chambord 
> 
> Can you believe that thing was originally built as a hunting lodge? _Rich people…_
> 
> // In the seventeenth century the Catholic Church was, apparently, pushing hard for the notion that _anyone_ unbaptised would end up in Limbo at best, not Heaven. (This has since changed - there’s like, an official Papal ruling that infants who die before christening go to Heaven.) This meant that stillborn infants, or those who died shortly after birth, weren’t put to rest in consecrated ground but, like suicides (and apparently shipwrecked sailors, who had no history or identity with the community that buried them), in liminal spaces - by crossroads, at the edges of fields, in unmarked graveyards, or even by holy wells or under the guttering of churches so the rainwater could bless them. Many parts of France maintained a loophole, however, _Sanctuaires à répit,_ ‘sanctuaries of respite’ - known chapels where people would place the baby on the altar and pray a lot, and they believed that it would be revived _just long enough_ to slip a baptism in. The custom lingered in France until around WWI.
> 
> Given Aramis’ canonical religious leanings, and his cluckiness around children, I feel this is something he would have cared about.
> 
> My best resource (Google Translate is my friend): https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuaire_à_répit
> 
> The church at Liesse turns out to be interesting in its own right, as well as for its Respite, keeping a Black Madonna behind its altar and being one of the places historical Louis and Anne went to pray for children. There may be a story in that.
> 
> (The earlier outlines of Aramis’ Baby Freakout were a helluva lot more maudlin, with all the emotional range that a heart-broken sixteen-year-old had to offer. Probably best I rewrote this.)
> 
> **
> 
> That was seriously too much research. _Do not ask me about Black Madonnas._


	9. "That was truly hurtful."

_Venice, last winter_

 

Sylvie Baudin caught up with the curly-haired dandy on the Rialto Bridge, his flighty perambulations about the city halted at last. Perhaps he had wanted her to catch him. He was unreasonably tall, wearing elaborate black, jet beads and obscure embroidery enriching the darkness of his doublet over the full black sleeves and ruffled collar of his shirt… a crow dressed for a feast perhaps. At her touch on his elbow he turned, leaning easily against one of the pillars supporting the bridge’s roof, comfortable in the wan sunshine and shadow. He’d rimmed his eyes with kohl, she thought, and his eyes stood out in his face, flicking here and there, assessing, laughing…

“Then what _do_ I call you?” she asked.

“What is a name but an easily discarded trifle? In this city, ‘Bazin’ will do for me easily enough.”

Something stirred in her memory, some kind of rumour… “The Lady's Dog,” Sylvie said.

He pulled back, the chill winter breeze ruffling his hair. “That was truly hurtful,” he said, affronted. “Dogs smell terrible. I mean really, slobber everywhere, no kind of brain, I ask you, cats are _much_ nicer...”

She huffed. “‘Bazin,’ then.”

“And what shall I call _you,_ Signorina? That is, if you have a name you are willing to share in these promiscuous parts?”

“Just Sylvie,” she answered grimly. And, “I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Well, you're young yet,” he said with an air of encouragement.

“But you _do_ do… jobs, do you not?” she asked gruffly, her eyes narrowed.

“I’ve been known to run errands of a delicate nature on occasion,” he answered, smiling. Then his eyes sharpened, but still smiling he added, “Your pardon, Signorina, if the following offends you, but I've found that some encounters are more delightful if the participants are clear on their limits. I don't poison wells. No-one’s yet asked me to steal a child but I suspect I would dislike it. And if you want a murder you will have to tell me a long and touching story. Even so I may decline.”

“Even if it's justified?” Sylvie asked, raising her chin.

“It is always justified,” he said gently, “to the one who wants it done.”

“Then what do you do, then?”

“Mm, deliver messages. Assist in the recovering of property. Assist in the retainment of property, including one's breath and blood. Smooth out life's little difficulties. And I’ve been known to deliver rouge,” he confided. “How might I please you, Signorina?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I would like,” she said carefully, “you to deliver a message to my father Hubert Baudin, in his residence in Dorsoduro.”

“The casuist,” 'Bazin’ said thoughtfully.

“The _theoretician,”_ Sylvie answered, very firm. “He looks for truths, he doesn’t argue things around until he gets the conclusion someone… pre-ordered of him.” The breeze shifted and tossed her own tight ringlets about her face. She brushed them back irritably.

“It is as you say. And the delicacy?”

“Currently,” she said, very gruff, “he is dwelling in Cell #10 in the _pozzi_ under the Doge’s Palace.”

His black eyes smiled. “I think I can help you with that.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now_

 

It probably wasn’t for the best, but Marie, short and beautifully plump, disappeared from the opening to the upper loft of the stables and then reappeared to climb down the solid wooden ladder, wrapped securely in an enormous shawl of a fine, dark red, her feet covered in dark stockings and wooden clogs.

“You’re friends of Jacques?” she said.

“Yeah,” said Porthos comfortably. Sometimes tone of voice went a long way to convincing a mark that everything was _alright..._ just keep the conversation going so they never stopped to really think. "Are you his sister or wife or,” he coughed delicately, “his lady-friend?”

She coughed delicately herself, points of colour showing in her round cheeks. _“Not_ his sister.”

Porthos chuckled, low and rich and charming.

In the main courtyard of the chateau, Jacques stopped with his hands on the hitching-poles of the little cart. The guard who had hailed him exchanged a few words, Jacques shrugged, awkwardly, and the burly man clipped him lightly across the ear before passing on. Young Jacques kept moving the cart, setting it by the opening to the oubliette, and shifted some other baggage around the place… busywork. He bent out of sight for a moment, then reappeared.

“Good boy,” breathed Porthos.

“He forgets to do his other chores,” Marie offered. “He’s good with the horses, _brilliant_ with the horses, but sometimes he forgets the other stuff. He means well.”

“Yeah, I bet he does.”

The girl’s eyes flicked to the other one, the dirty old man Porthos had fished out of the hole. “That’s m’uncle,” said Porthos, “he’s a bit…” he tapped his forehead, “doesn’t talk much. ‘M taking him home.”

“Sore feet, eh?”

“Jacques is a good sort for letting us stop a bit.”

“I’m glad he came back to Savoy,” Marie confided. “He used to work for the most horrendous villains, when he was living with his papa in France. All that drinking and brawling… people are _nice,_ here.”

“Maybe they were nicer when you got to know’em,” Porthos said comfortably.

“It wasn’t just the fighting and card-cheating,” she said earnestly, eyes round. “One of them got away with murder, the King of France wrote him out a pardon as easy as kiss-my-hand, and another, one night he was dragging his wife through the streets _by the hair.”_

“Well that’s -” Porthos bit his tongue. Under all the grimy hair the old man seemed oddly amused. “That must have been really horrible for him to see. ‘Specially for a good sort like Jacques.”

**

D’Artagnan paced in circles around the bottom of the oubliette, his feet in their soft boots feeling all the stones and dirt of the rubble. He breathed in a slow, deep rhythm and thought of a sunny afternoon a year ago, on leave and walking with his wife through the royal gardens. Constance had looked radiant that day, the sun calling all the fire out of her hair…

A quiet shuffle from above, and a long slender rope dropped down, its end bobbing in front of his face like a friendly snake come to visit the worst garden of Eden in creation.

He reached out hesitantly and tested it - solidly anchored.

He breathed in deep, let it out, gave a brief prayer of thankfulness, and started to climb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not always horrible to my characters. See? They're doing juuuuuust fiiiiiine.
> 
> // _wearing elaborate black… a crow dressed for a feast perhaps_ \- I’m not saying Milady was playing dress-up, but I’m not _not_ saying it either.
> 
> // _“The casuist,” … “The theoretician,”_ \- casuistry as a description is a bit of an odd duck. It’s literally case-based reasoning, and people use it all the time, but it had a bad reputation around this time frame for being abused to justify “moral laxity” Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry (Sylvie and her dad are free-thinkers and I guess she’s a bit touchy.)
> 
> // _One of them got away with murder_ \- I’m assuming the intricate details of the explode-the-Court-of-Miracles plot and the murder of Young Lord Whatsit were hushed up, and much of the entrap-Milady plan was restricted to Treville and the Inseperables. In which case... how exactly would that look to people who saw only pieces of the story?


	10. "... with wings dipped..."

_Savoy, a year ago_

 

It was the middle of the night by the chateau clock, and quiet with it. The courtyard was still; not even a sleepless horse in one of the stable-blocks whickered. A sentry, perched on the outer wall, stamped a bored foot; a brace of ravens perched wing-folded in the fir trees nearby cawed their disdain for the night.

Quiet. Still.

Among the flagstones near the great door to the house, a circular iron grate was set solid and dour. And from it, like the first tiny rebellion of wildflowers in spring, white fingers poked through. They wiggled, felt around, then, with exquisite slowness, the grate began to wobble and turn, the sober iron turned drunken…

A moment, another, and it lifted as a creature crawled out from underneath it, dark, hairy, and stinking. Crouching low to the ground it replaced it, setting it solidly back in its assigned spot and gave it an affectionate pat as its brief foray into whimsicality ceased.

Crouched still to the ground, the creature’s shaggy head swivelled back and forth, listening and scenting the air. Then it loped away.

 

**

 

_Savoy, now_

 

D’Artagnan kept his grasp on the rope like he did on a sword: solid but flexible. He had a horror of losing his grip to something as ridiculous as a cramp. Hand over hand, he pulled himself out of ‘hell’.

Near the top, he anchored himself with his ankles and shuttered the lantern hanging at his hip, so as not to shine a light from below. In the dark he climbed, hanging along in the void.

**

“... ‘Specially for a good sort like Jacques,” Porthos said, keeping a confiding warmth in his voice.

“Yes, he is a good sort,” said Marie, still wrapped in her enormous dark red shawl. “He doesn’t have much brain, but he’s brilliant with the horses and he has a very sweet heart. And he lets me do the thinking when thinking needs to be done. A girl could do a lot worse than that, trust me.”

“Picked out a good’un, yeah?”

“We’re going to get married,” she confided. “The Duke gave his permission, and the Duchess is opening up the big chapel on the next feast day for all the young couples who want to tie the knot someplace fancy.” 

“They sound like good sorts, too.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Much better than the _old_ Duke. Himself is a bit grumpy sometimes, but he looks after his people. We love him.”

“Yeah?” Porthos had to fight to keep the edge out of his voice. “Ever’one loves a good boss.”

“So I have to ask,” she said, very seriously, “because I don’t think Jacques did. What are your intentions towards the Duke?”

**

In the void-darkness, d’Artagnan felt a hand upwards for the rope, gripping it and pulling himself upwards to the sky.

It slipped.

It was not his hand, gripping the rope, that betrayed him to a little jogging movement downwards. It was the rope itself, sloppily tied, the unchancy knot’s heart betraying itself - and d’Artagnan. 

And it slipped again.

It was such a very long way to fall, to fall in the dark.

He could slide down right now, be further to the ground when it gave way and dropped him. There were handholds in the wall - he could try again later - Aramis managed it - he could try again.

In a mad, scrabbling dash, feeling blindly for the rope, d’Artagnan sprinted for the top.

**

“Oh, now, you don’t want to worry about that,” Porthos said soothingly. “Don’t you fret about it.”

“I’m a terrible shot,” Marie said, her calm betrayed by a faint wobble in her voice, “but at this distance even I could tag you.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” said Porthos. He could see the filthy old man he’d hauled out of the pit gone very still. He could see, in the dim candle-light of the stable, a bump under the girl’s wrapping of shawl, that might well be a pistol gripped in one white-knuckled hand. “I’m not here to do anything with the Duke. I won’t lie, he ain’t a person I like at all, at all, but I’m passing through. Just here to take my friends and go home.” His hands flexed, then he loosened them, he kept his shoulders open and disarming. Even if she missed, the noise of the pistol would bring down fire and brimstone on their heads.

Shaking, Marie said, “You’re _not_ more assassins then? From France?”

“I don’t know what they’ve been telling you, but that ain’t our way.”

_“Pfeh.”_

“It’s not _my_ way,” Porthos amended. “And it wasn’t my friend’s way, either. Savoy hurt him, hurt him bad, but it still wasn’t his way. So Savoy hurt him _again,_ you know that, Marie? This place made him over into different flesh, my friend just isn’t the same man he was and I think your sweet Jacques had a lot to do with that. What did he do, buy favour with the Duke by making up a _story_ ‘bout an assassin? ‘Bout a man who never did aught but think kindly of young Jacques and help him learn his letters?

“Or was he afraid? Did he think we were coming after him for some different sin, that we were the Hand of God come with wings dipped in blood?” He spared a flickering glance at the old man, the captive that Aramis had driven himself to rescue, gone into the mountains in bad weather with a damaged lung and terrifying, stifled nightmares, wearing himself thin and white as a bone to do it.

“But that wasn’t his way, Marie. And - _whatever_ he is now, whatever Savoy and your sweet Jacques and others made of him - he wants us to go in peace.

“So that’s what we’re doing, Marie. Can you let us go in peace?”

A footstep, behind him. The girl with the pistol looked to the side, her weapon, unnoticed, moving ever-so-slightly away.

“Let it be, Marie,” Jacques said tiredly. 

**

In the courtyard, the simple sober iron grate sat low, unobtrusive and ignored.

The rough and sloppy knot tied around its bars opened itself and the rope slithered down, dropping into the darkness.

A hand reached through from below and gripped with white-knuckled fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _It was the middle of the night by the chateau clock_ \- line borrowed from Coleridge’s _Christabel,_ just because I liked the rhythms of it.
> 
> // _Himself is a bit grumpy..._ \- this is hella old-fashioned, but ‘Himself’/ ‘Herself’ can be used as informal but affectionate-and-respectful terms for the senior member of a family or close-knit group. I might have called my grandmother ‘Herself’ if we still used that kind of language where I live. So if you see it crop up in an older book, that’s what the writer meant. (Brought to you by the Committee For Appreciating Weird English Vernacular.)


	11. "Not the point."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eee! Quick update! Mostly talking, though. (Some of Athos' dialogue is influenced by a scene in the original book.)

_the Convent at Bourbon-les-Eaux, a few days ago_

 

“Put out to pasture like a broken down old mare,” Madame said sourly.

“Bragelonne is a pleasant enough estate,” Aramis said cheerfully, unwrapping her damaged hand and examining it with gentle hands of his own, “I passed by there a while back, on courier duty with Athos.”

She stared at him levelly.

“We're not talking about Athos,” Aramis said hastily.

She tossed her head. “Athos is not the point. How odd to say that,” she added curiously. “It's a pitiful sop to keep me out of the way so Her Majesty doesn't have to countenance killing someone she knows.”

“You sound so annoyed by that,” he answered, grinning.

She tilted her head as she considered him, eyes gone black in the low light of the single candle that lit her narrow chamber. He waggled his eyebrows at her.

“You were a good Musketeer,” she said consideringly, “from what I saw. And are an excellent worker in the miracle trade. Does it trouble you to hold both those identities inside at the same time?”

"You never -” he broke off. “You never asked of me something I truly found disagreeable - whatever that says of my innate character. The man before, and the man before that, they don’t quarrel for the most part. Sometimes they see things differently.” His lips moved in a smile. “And then I feel just a tad queasy.” He scooped more pungent salve from the little jar and applied it, checking the movement of her remaining fingers. Very softly he muttered, “It is a different shaggy beast, the man in between.” He twitched his head irritably and began to wind a strip of clean linen. “I am in God’s hands. Somebody’s hands, at any rate.”

“No maggots?” she asked, watching him work.

“It's too late,” he said. “The fever is in the core of you now, and nothing to do but sweat it out. If the weather were better I’d suggest taking the waters, but...” he shrugged. “Take a turn about the room when you feel up to it, and nice deep breaths of clean air often as you can.”

“Whatever would I _do,_ rusticating in the country?”

“Fish for trout? Write your memoirs? Enjoy your stake in the _ancien regime?_ You could always,” he said encouragingly, “burn the whole thing down and toast chestnuts in the ashes.”

“Do you think to come with me?”

He hesitated. “I have an errand to run, before I find any kind of stopping place.”

“And that is…?” Her voice curled out, sweet as a lure made of honey, but he held his peace.

Brisk, she asked, “You want me to close my eyes and trust you?”

“Ha! Absurd! I don't trust myself.”

“Speak, then.”

“Richelieu might still be alive,” he said, and dropped his eyes. She put her good hand to his face and rubbed the corner of his eye as he went on, “I shared a cell with him I think, I don't. I hit my head and I don't remember it well. But I promised Treville I'd look, so.”

“Are you asking my permission?” she purred.

His dark eyes met hers. “I can… adjust the task, if it bothers you.”

“You’re the one who's bothered.”

She dropped her hand to his chest, where his black doublet had come unbuttoned and rested it there, only the cloth of his shirt guarded his skin from hers, and felt him breathe for a handful of moments.

“I'm always going to own a piece of you,” she said at last. “Right here, my hook is in your heart.”

“What a vivid way to put it.”

“If you raise the dead, you can truly call yourself a master of the miracle trade,” she said, quirking the corner of her mouth.

“There is that,” he said lightly. “One strives for professional excellence and the respect of one’s peers.”

“There’s just one thing, little brother. If you harrow hell and make the devil dance…”

“Yes?”

“Tell him you asked me first.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now_

 

“Let’s start from the beginning,” the Savoyan Guard Captain said wearily. It was very late and two of his children were down with a fever, tended by his dead wife’s sister and a maidservant. He hadn’t seen them since early morning. He did not deserve this conversation.

“In the beginning was the word,” said Athos, blinking cheerfully, his vowels beautifully rounded and every consonant enunciated. “And the word was _with_ God, and the word _was_ God. _In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud… apud…”_

“Some of my forest rangers found you near a campsite the poachers and smugglers use.”

Fretful, Athos continued, _“Apud. Apud apud apud._ A pox on this _apud,_ he is no friend of mine. _Apud…”_

 _“... apud Deum,”_ the Guard Captain said, and a wondrous smile wreathed Athos’ face.

 _”Thank you,”_ he said, sitting back in the hard wooden chair he’d been dropped after they’d ushered him peremptorily into the watchroom. “You’re a really good friend.” He opened up his doublet and felt around in it, retrieving again his silver flask. “Here have a drink. A drink on.” He hesitated. “A drink on me.”

The Guard Captain lifted his hand. “What is your name?”

Athos smacked the table. “I don’t drink with people who aren’t my friends! Who are you?!”

 _“Give me strength,”_ the Guard Captain muttered. “Edouard. Call me Edouard.”

Athos smiled again, sweetly, and offered his hand. “I am delighted to meet you, Edouard. For that you may have some of my brandy.”

Rolling his eyes, Captain Edouard Filippo took it and sipped gingerly. His eyebrows rose. “It’s good,” he muttered.

“Oh, just a little Armagnac,” Athos said, diffident but proud. _“I_ like it, anyway.”

“What do I call you, er, ‘friend’?”

Athos leaned in. “Sometimes my wife called me ‘Ollie’,” he confided.

“Alright then, Ollie -”

Athos’ face crumpled. “She doesn’t love me any more!” he wailed. “How can _I_ call myself that, then? Isn’t ‘Ollie’ dead now, that sweet and milky man? What have I become, Apud?”

“You’re still the same man,” Captain Edouard assured him. He patted Athos’ chest. “Don’t you still breathe as ‘Ollie’ did? The memory remains; you’re just on a different page. You’re the same you, just a different part of you than the old you.” He frowned, looking puzzled, sipped more of the brandy, then yawned. “So what do I call the you that is now, so that I have something to put in my books?”

“You’re a writer?”

“That was my wife,” said Captain Edouard, looking sad.

Athos disengaged the silver flask from the Captain’s fingers, lifted it to his lips, then handed it back, motioning to drink. “To old wives, ardent and with the souls of poets.”

A rueful smile creased Captain Edouard’s face. “I’ll drink to that.” And he did, putting action to words, then yawned again. “Now what do I put you down as in my records, because I don’t think you want to go down as ‘Apud’.”

Puzzled, Athos said, “But I thought _you_ were ‘Apud’, oh dear, I must have been mistaken but it would be terribly rude to correct you on that.”

Sighing, Captain Edouard said, “Correct me, I beg: I don’t want you to be ‘Apud’ either.”

“Well, good then.”

The silence stretched out.

“Captain Apud, are you quite well?” Athos asked solicitously.

The Guard Captain did not answer, his eyes drooping shut. Very gently, Athos retrieved his silver flask from the man’s fingers. It contained what was indeed some very fine brandy, and also extract of poppy - a medicine they had procured at awkward expense before realising, with some frustration, that Aramis would not touch a drop of it, even at the worst of his headaches… “Everything has a purpose under Heaven,” Athos muttered softly, and, “I pray you, Apud, may I borrow your keys?”

No answer.

“I thank you.”

The other guards in the room, who had availed themselves freely of the liquor as they waited for the Captain, were already dozing, one propped on his feet in a corner of the room as soldiers often do sleep, another perched awkwardly on a bench.

As he eased himself up from the chair, Athos ‘borrowed’ an abandoned uniform cloak. It was dishonest, but so were many things on this sinful earth.

At the door he paused, looking back. “‘I know my catechism,’” he said softly. “Huh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _“In the beginning was the word…”_ \- John 1:1


	12. "The strength in the array."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're just going to surf this tide of unprecedented productivity for as long as it lasts, eh?
> 
> **
> 
> CW: content warnings for the flashback basically involve Milady having had a hard life and owning a recently endorsed Villain Card, child endangerment, canonical dubcon and, well, what period aristocracy considered appropriate marriage practice was seriously skeevy.
> 
> Have I put you off? Oh dear. The present day section, starting at _Savoy, now,_ is cozier.

_early last spring, Milady’s rooms, in a Duchy on the Spanish Road_

 

It wasn’t that she _wanted_ to kill the kid.

She’d been hired to make young Wilhemina von Argle-Bargle _disappear._ An unequivocal death of the girl-child to whom rulership of the Duchy descended would provoke a hotly-contested succession dispute among her current heirs, which, while probably bloody, might well resolve itself quickly. Her disappearance - maybe dead, maybe alive - would keep it simmering at a pitch of ill-natured bickering, as various parties tried to find her, prove her vital status one way or another, dig up look-alikes and try to pass them off as her, contest others’ claims… The interference of herself and Aramis would be so much more effective if no-one found a body. But - keeping the moppet alive was a hassle. What to do with her, that she didn’t come back? A shallow grave at a crossroads worked easily enough: much neater than the alternatives.

She’d never had much illusion about the innocence or harmlessness of girl-children, either. She’d been one.

_Somewhere there is a girl, curled up in the corner of an attic in a rickety slum-tenement. She is very ill, and very hungry. No-one knows her name. One thing keeps her alive. It is rage._

She drummed her fingers on the table in their rented quarters. They were shabby, tonight, and the proprietor hadn’t maintained it well - a draft from the winter wind pried, whining sorrowfully, at the shutters. There was a bottle of sugared cordial to her right; a little flask of poppy extract to the left. The maid, Kitty, snored in the corner, wrapped in three layers of shawls.

“I’m not entirely comfortable with this,” said Aramis, chin on hand, black eyes thoughtful. “We’re taking her away from her home and any loved ones she might still have.”

“Do we have time to think this through?” she asked. “We do not.”

She had no sympathy for the dewy-eyed, either, they of the unfurrowed brows. All that meant was that someone had sheltered them, that they had not needed to worry, to make harsh choices to ensure they might eat that day, sleep that night.

_Somewhere there is a girl, fighting and scratching and kicking for everything that is hers. She hates the world and she wants it, wants all of it, glittering and sharp and dirty as it is. She is hungry and she will never be full._

“It’s very simple,” she said soothingly. “I’ll add a bit of poppy to this cordial, you’ll get her to drink it, and after that it will be easy enough to spirit her out of the building. Not a peep, eh?”

He drew breath.

“The wedding is in the morning. Do you _want_ her to marry her uncle? He’s fifty-four. And,” she said, blunt and startling herself with the gentleness, “Old Ernesto doesn’t… have a good reputation in this regard." More brisk, she added, "Just whisk her away, spit-spot, we’ll work the rest out as we go.” She smiled. Crow-foot wrinkles showed at the corners of his eyes and she rubbed one, lightly, with her finger.

In some respects this wasn’t about the _kid_ at all. It was about sin.

Convince someone to sin on your behalf and they’re always a little more biddable afterwards. The Cardinal, crafty grey Richelieu, had tried to teach her that trick but it was one she’d already known. It wasn’t even the potential blackmail, though that was useful, after making someone do something they despised. It changed a person’s soul - forever after they knew what they might _do,_ given cause, a whole new array of activities become thinkable for them. And they knew that they’d done it for _you._ While a bare handful might run from that knowledge most stayed, cowed, respecting your will that much more.

It was so easy to push someone over the edge. A little seduction or threat for a favour that didn’t seem so _very_ bad, that worked often. For the truly stiff-necked there were ‘accidents’. _Oh dear, the consequences were not foreseen, so sad._ It wouldn’t be Aramis’ hands that mixed the draft, that ‘miscalculated’ the strength of it compared to little Wilhemina’s body-weight. But it would be his hands that gave it her to drink and sent her into a sleep from which she could not wake, and that knowledge would stay with him.

_Somewhere there is a woman, young, barely out of girlhood, and she is fucking a blacksmith. She is fucking him because if she does not she will die in the morning sure and certain. Because the cloak of ‘innocence’, false as it was, that she had so painfully woven and wrapped herself in was no kind of armour, not for someone like her. Does Remi think her innocent, a wronged woman? Or that he is helping a murderess go free? Either way he sins tonight and she owns a piece of his soul now. Over his bare sweaty shoulder she sees hanging on the wall the pure white dress they mean to hang her in. One day he will die by her hand, she swears, and she smiles, and she guides him, grunting, to a finish._

Since she’d realised what she had in Aramis, that the book she’d borrowed from her husband’s library was a _palimpsest,_ all the letters scraped off and beautifully blank for her to write in, she’d had a thought for his morals.

Aramis was clever, and he was crafty, and he truly loved to please her. (It was warming.) But after more than a season of travelling together his games were still more rabbit than fox, harmless elaborate trickeries preferred over going for a quick kill.

Aramis would be so much more _effective_ if he stopped jibbing at the little things. Teaching him expediency would be a kindness in the long run.

_Somewhere there is a girl._

She ran quick calculations as to the strength of the poppy extract she’d bought from the apothecary, and the size of their little target. She tapped in a few careful drops. 

Then she put her hand on his cheek, and smiled, and said, “Trust me.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now, the nursery of the Ducal apartments_

 

“... The bishop glides in great sweeps across the board,” Aramis instructed. “His reach is long but he is trapped, also, bound to the black or the white. One might consider this the separation between Church and State if one wished.” He wiggled one hand equivocally. “Or a reflection of the average churchman’s morals, however they try to straddle both spiritual concerns and the practicalities of life.” A chill breeze from the open, diamond-paned window at his back ran fingers down his spine, but he declined to shiver.

He picked up the next piece and his mouth curled in a faint smile at the corners. “And this is the knight,” he said, tracing the carved mane of the ebony chess piece. “He is a chivalric fellow, very well meaning, and he hops around a bit.” He traced the L-shape of the movement. “He can relieve your forces where no other piece can, at times, though some call him unreliable.” His face drooped into a woebegone expression and his current companion, young Francis Hyacinth of Savoy, giggled.

“Are you a knight, Aramis?” the small rumple-haired boy asked.

“I try,” Aramis said seriously. “One always tries.” His eyes dropped to the last of the pieces. “The pawns,” he said now. “Plural, it’s best to think of them, for their strength is in the array.” He nudged four forward, demonstrating how they kept a line, shadowing each other with their halting movements, and then showed one taking a mighty enemy rook with a crisp snap of his fingers. Francis giggled again, catching the slaughtered ‘soldier’ that Aramis tossed him.

“And if one of these hardworking young ladies reaches the end of the board,” Aramis added thoughtfully, “the furthest it is possible to go, she can become a queen, crowned in the deeps that is enemy territory.” Passing his hand over the board he used a simple carnival trick to swap out a pawn for the crowned piece. He zoomed her over the board along the diagonals and the straights, knocking down enemy pieces with brisk clicks, then set her to rest in her new home square. “Her reach is far, as you see, though I wonder perhaps if she gets a little lonely.” He leaned over the lacquered board, then, his dark clothing rustling, and touched Francis’s forehead. _This is important._ “People will tell you that chess is about the death of the king, but it’s really not. It is the relationships that the pieces hold with each other: who they will guard, what position they can hold or opponent capture… what they are willing to die for. Pay attention, young Francis Hyacinth, and learn the lesson your pawns are willing to teach you. 

“And besides,” he added, with a rueful, hurting smile, “when the king dies the best possible outcome is the end of the game. Where’s the fun in that, eh?” Francis looked at him solemnly. “Then we are in agreement.” He touched the boy’s forehead again then sat back. “But what does your mother think?”

He turned his head to look at the Duchess of Savoy, standing in the doorway of the nursery, still dressed in daywear of resplendent yellow silk and loops of pearls. “What do you think, Your Grace?”

Slowly her right hand came up, the arm behind it very straight. She pointed the pistol in it at Aramis and said, “Move away from my son.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // So, yeah, uncle-niece and aunt-nephew marriages were _totally_ a thing among European aristocracy in that time-frame. cf. Avunculate Marriage for a good long list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avunculate_marriage (Ngh.)
> 
> // the Spanish Road was a corridor of relatively neutral territories which Spain used to transfer troops and supplies from its holdings in Italy (particularly the port city Genoa) to its _other_ holdings in the Spanish Netherlands.
> 
> // We see Wilhemina the Plot Moppet elsewhere in “A Day In The Life”, one of the sections of “Care and Feeding II”, and Kitty mentions her briefly in “Taken By The Collar III”. (Everything works out fine for Wilhemina the Plot Moppet, I promise you. They haul her around for a month and then fob her off on Queen Flavia of Ruritania.)
> 
> // _Francis Hyacinth_ \- Francis Hyacinth of Savoy, inherited the Duchy after Victor Amadeus died (his older brother, the kid we saw in 1.04, had already passed. I'm so sorry. It happened.). Francis Hyacinth leads a long and happy life, don’t bother looking it up.


	13. "The still of the night."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the delayed chapter; it's been making me cry. (Well, that may be the allergies if we want to be _literal,_ but in any case I found it a bit frustrating.)

_Savoy, a year and a half ago_

 

Christine sat in a hoop-backed chair in front of her vanity table and looked in the mirror.

The maids had unlaced her heavy court dress and removed the stays, changing her into a comfortable linen night-gown and quilted satin robe. They had taken the jewels and the pins out of her hair and let the twists and torrents of it fall over her shoulders, and then they had left her private chambers. Christine liked to brush her own hair before retiring for the night: it was a time for peace and reflection, much needed in a life that was often busy and strained. And at times there were other benefits. 

She watched the woman in the mirror: pale, dark-eyed, a little weary around the mouth. She smiled at the woman, frowned, she considered her gravely. The woman watched back, silent and serene.

A heavy step, the creak of footsteps, the smell of leather and horse and steel matched with the daintier scents of an aristocratic life. Closing her eyes briefly she opened them to see a sturdy grey-haired man in glass, standing behind her. “May I?” he asked.

She smiled, a gesture unrehearsed. “Victor.” Taking it as permission he reached over her, so that she felt the warmth of him, and took up a horn comb and an ivory-backed brush. He gathered up the tangles of her hair in large callused hands and, very gently, began to work the knots loose, to stroke it straight. She settled into the familiar ritual, comfortable as a much-loved cat.

“It isn’t a kindness,” he told her, when he was done and braiding her hair into long, simple braids for the night.

Christine opened eyes long since drifted shut. “What isn’t?”

“The food,” he said, quiet and gruff. “The extra you’re having thrown to the ones in the forgetting-place. It isn’t kind, to them or you, to put off the ending.”

“Are you angry?” she asked, stilling.

“No. I won’t stop you, either. But if you think what you’re doing is kind, Christine…”

In the glass she watched him finish one long plait and tie it off with a scrap of ribbon. He laid it gently over one shoulder and gathered the rest of her hair.

“I am not kind,” he added gruffly, “so I won’t stop you. Will you tell your brother?”

She shook her head, softly enough that he did not lose his touch on her hair. “If I told Louis it would not be good for Savoy, not at all. That makes things very simple.” It would not be good for France either, and that also was simple, two horses bound to one chariot and for a time they pulled together. But she was so very tired.

When Victor was done she leaned back, relaxing her posture, so that it was so very easy for him to wrap a solid arm around her. She turned her head and met his eyes, unmediated by the glass. “Will you come to bed?” he asked. She smiled.

A tap at the door, and the head governess entered without waiting for permission.

“Your Grace, Your Grace,” she said, her iron-grey hair unexpectedly wispy, slightly loosened from its respectable coiffure. She blinked wide, warm brown eyes and curtsied worriedly, shifting her dark brocade skirts in a brief bob. “It’s your eldest. He’s taken poorly.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, now, inside the chateau_

 

Athos had heard a lot of Aramis’ stories by now. For a man who did not like answering questions he surely loved to gloat, so long as some veil of plausible deniability could be obtained.

In some of them - an account of visiting a dear friend who starched kerchiefs perhaps, or a brief but unpleasant theological quarrel with a bullion-embroiderer - he had mentioned one of the shields of the covert agent: the walk. He’d showed his friends one evening, demonstrating a street-bravo, a melancholy nobleman, a cocky young firebrand keen to display the sword on his hip, a handful of others. _Most folk… skim-read the people they see around them,_ he’d said with a diffident smile. _With an appropriate hat or coat and a walk like you belong, they’ll mostly accept the text you present them and let you pass by. Just be careful trying it with an actual seamstress,_ he’d added ruefully, _they’ve a devilish eye for detail._ Athos lacked his friend’s gift for mimicry but he surely knew how to walk like a soldier.

In the borrowed uniform cloak he paced the halls inside the chateau, composed and stern as he ever was on late-night duty in the Louvre.

There’d be a way out - a side door from a scullery, or a dairy, some basement with another entrance… anything but the door he’d come through so very loudly. He did not quite have the nerve for _that._ Until then he walked as if he belonged there, intimidating the occasional servant still awake, a grim-faced rabbit pretending he was a hunting-dog…

In a grand hall that led to the great outer doors at the front of the building, he spied, on a glorious double-spiral stairway, a flicker of lustrous yellow skirt moving upwards.

Up was not _out_ for Athos. He should bluff his way out the front doors and circle back to the camp to pick up sleeping Aramis. With any luck Porthos and d’Artagnan might have done their hidden work and would be there also and they could all _go._

Aramis had spoken also of the covert agent’s sword, a great two-edged thing that cut the hand which wielded it: curiosity.

Athos swore softly to himself and, as if he belonged there, proceeded upwards.

**

In the high nursery, Aramis smiled at the five-year-old child he had been teaching chess. “Your mother wants you,” he told Francis Hyacinth. “None of that,” he told the boy’s wrinkled nose, “a true gentleman is never too old to hug his mother. There will be time for playing games later.”

Christine kept her pistol levelled at Aramis, pragmatically at his chest, the large target, instead of his head. It was a pretty little gun, small, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, but it would shoot just the same. She lifted one arm and let her eldest surviving son fold himself against her side.

“My apologies for the eccentric entrance,” Aramis said, still sitting in the low chair made for a nursery, with his back to the open window. “It was so noisy in the back yard my nerves had quite the turn. Even so, I thought I’d pop up for a quiet chat. The still of the night is a pleasant time for talking, not so?”

“How long have you been out?” Christine asked levelly.

Aramis held up one hand and waggled it back and forth. “Perhaps a year, give or take a few weeks. I trust I look better than I did our last conversation.”

“You are tidier,” she said briskly, “and cleaner. I could shoot you right now.”

“But could you walk away?” he asked. Francis turned his head and smiled at him, and he smiled back. “And truly, Your Grace, how often do you get a chance to really _talk?”_

“Given our prior acquaintance you may address me as Christine.” He smiled, sweetly, as at an unexpected gift.

“From your surprise, Christine, I gather it was a quiet night when I left, unheralded and unnoticed. I’m glad of that: one wouldn’t want to make a fuss. Tonight, though…” he trailed off.

The corner of her mouth quirked up. “What about tonight?”

**

“You.”

Athos kept walking on the rich carpet, his pace steady, his shoulders set in that peculiar not-slump of a disciplined but tired man.

Through a half open door, he heard - _Aramis_ \- say easily, “They don’t know anything.”

Christ.

_“You.”_

He turned a corner by a marble statue of Hypatia and waited.

The older man in a guard cloak of his own, and an officer insignia, followed him around the corner, his grey-green eyes furious. “You are not part of the personal guard,” he hissed.

“They wanted extra, for tonight,” said Athos in a weary drawl. “Considering.” He sighed. “Not that I’m needed.”

“You don’t belong here,” the officer insisted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't already, I'd like to recommend you check out "Brewer's Boy", a bit of backstory from the very talented DaisyNinjaGirl: http://archiveofourown.org/works/12121155


	14. "Why?"

_the Convent of Bourbon-les-Eaux, years ago_

 

“Tell me another story,” Ana murmured sleepily against Aramis’ throat, as her hand rubbed smoothly against her ribs. “Tell me another true thing.” It was quiet, this night, and he was warm against her. There was peace here, at this pause in their travels.

She felt the hum in his throat as he answered, “I was born in a house of women.”

“In a convent?” She rose on one elbow and stared at him in the low light of their last candle.

“Not that kind.” She frowned, not understanding, and he clarified, “On a street in Amiens there was a house signed the Moon-and-Venus, where lived many beautiful women like birds in a cage. And the kindest and most beautiful was my mother.”

She stared at him, silent, as understanding crept in. But why was he telling her this? Was it some kind of bed trick, _oho, what did you just sleep with?_

Unbidden, the word formed in her mouth: “Why?”

“I've nothing to give but honesty.”

But Ana thought, looking at him, that honesty hadn’t been on his mind at all. She’d startled it out of him, perhaps, in the tenderness of the night, in the gentleness of the stories they’d shared. That he’d told her something he’d never meant anyone to know, that the reason he lay so still, now, her perfect gentle knight, was that he waited for her to pull away, as if he had confessed to leprosy. _Son of a whore,_ that old insult...

“Your mother raised a kind and beautiful son,” Ana said at last. “Any woman would be proud to be loved by you.” She kissed him on the forehead, then the lips, and golden was the moment.

 

**

 

_Savoy, now, the family nursery_

 

“What _about_ tonight?” Christine of Savoy, Christine of France asked, the corner of her mouth quirking very slightly.

“I’m going to make an assumption,” said Aramis, tilting his head, “that the mess in the courtyard was caused by some French fishermen getting lost and treading on a few sore toes. No doubt feelings were hurt and sensibilities are outraged.”

As levelly as she held the gun, Christine asked, “And if your assumption is true, and I object to this ‘fishing expedition’, what of it?”

“It doesn’t have to be a trouble,” Aramis said easily, “they don’t know anything. An expedition Treville sent out on an off-chance, prompted by the wild stories of a man _very much_ not known for the veracity of his tale-telling… He needs your intelligence and the Anti-Spanish League your husband is running far too much to question if you say, _oh, so sad, he must have remembered wrong._ Who would even recognise the old man, if they saw him?"

His eyes flickered to the boy, half-hidden in his mother’s skirts. “Perhaps young Francis should not listen to the rest of this? Children understand more than their parents realise, sometimes.”

She shook her head minutely. “My son stays with me, tonight.”

“Alright.”

“What -” she shook her head irritably - “what was it like?”

His eyes dropped, lifted. “I dreamed of that place sometimes, and I knew that I was damned.” He twitched himself. “It doesn’t signify, Christine.”

Brightening, he said, “I can square it with your husband also, given a little co-operation from you. If you let the fishermen go, this poor sinner volunteers to take the blame.”

“Do you have a fetish for self-mortification?” she asked sharply.

“Not at all: I'm simply practical. I’m a broken-down old horse, damaged in wind, with some highly inconvenient headaches. Not really a keeper, if one has to choose. And… it _is_ my fault.”

She had the most beautiful eyes, rich as chocolate with ambergris, eyes that felt as if they were reading his soul.

Carefully, he explained, “None of them would have been here in harm’s way, if I had kept my fool mouth shut. I owe them for that, Christine.” Aramis stood slowly, feeling the weariness in his bones and the chill wind at his back. He stretched slightly; the healing scar in his side pulled a little as he settled against the window-sill. The Duchess of Savoy’s gun followed him smoothly as he moved. She reminded him of Madame. She reminded him of _Ana._

“I had other options,” he added, smiling slightly, “but none of them truly appealed.” He didn’t even glance at the boy. “So I offer instead a deal. If any part of my life or deaths have been of use to you, lady, I beg you to accept it.”

“You shouldn’t be so quick to sacrifice yourself,” she said, face expressionless, but her free hand turned her son’s face into her skirts and covered his ear.

He tilted his head. “Don’t fret. I have loved and been loved, which is enough for any man. I absolve you of wrongdoing. Just. Please. This time make it quick.”

“I never learned your proper name, do you know?”

He smiled. “Aramis. Aramis Rene d’Herblay.”

“There is a problem with this plan, Aramis Rene d’Herblay,” she said.

“Oh?”

“You assumed wrong. The mess in the courtyard has nothing to do with any ‘fishermen’, French or otherwise.”

He shut his eyes. Opened them. Felt something inside him give way. “Ah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm feeling a bit under the weather, this week: please be gentle in the comments.
> 
> "Fisherman" and "sinner" are very easy to pun with, in French.
> 
> According to Wikipedia, at any rate, the historical Victor Amadeus, whatever his resentment to France, was running an Anti-Spanish League in Italy under Richelieu's direction. Shrug.


	15. "Does he feel like this all the time?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _In which the plot, in the manner of soup to which corn-starch has been added, begins to thicken._ \- Paarfi of Roundwood.

_Paris, years ago_

 

The under-crypt of the church was lit with torches in sconces and also candles, in little rows set along ledges in the hall like votives. From the high window a pale moon cast her own blessing of light onto the two Musketeers’ faces.

At the end of the corridor, after passing through a barrier of iron bars, Aramis stopped. There was nowhere to go from here. He turned to the priest - older, slick as all the priests in the Cardinal’s train became - who waited, inscrutable in his caped robes and skullcap. Exasperated, Aramis said, “Well, what is this message.”

Father Allard bowed slightly and gestured. “You’re looking at it, m’sieur.”

Aramis cast his eyes around. There was nothing but a handful of memorial stones set in the wall, some old, some new - the carving of them still very crisp. His eyes tightened. _Adele Bessette. 1605 - 1630. Died For Love._

Athos stepped up beside him, frowning. “I didn’t know Adele was dead?” he half-asked, turning to Aramis.

Aramis glanced, almost desperate, at the priest, then back to his friend. “The last I heard she’d gone to the Cardinal’s country estate, I -” He took a breath. “I thought she’d made her choice.”

“She did, m’sieur,” Father Allard interrupted smoothly from behind them, and with finality added, “She chose you. The Cardinal said you’d understand the necessity for her death.” The two Musketeers stalked towards him. As Aramis’ hand, quite without his bidding, seized the priest’s shoulder, he added, with a slight edge, “He killed her because she loved _you.”_

Athos shoved between them, breaking Aramis’ grasp. “Go on!” he shouted, shoving the priest through the little barred gate back the way they had come. It wasn’t, truly, the churchman’s well-being he had in mind. _“Get out of here!”_ he snarled

He stood between them and turned back to Aramis, lifting a warning hand. Breathing hard, Aramis pulled himself back, half savage, half desolate.

“The Cardinal knew all your secrets,” said Allard over Athos’ shoulder, sweet as poisoned honey. “He will expose your sins even from beyond the grave.” He turned, slick and smooth as if about to give a sermon, and paced away.

Athos turned back and paced towards Aramis, steady and gentle as if his friend were a spooked horse. Aramis moved backwards, looking desperately from Athos to the stone tablets and back. He set his hands on his hips… dropped them. At last he said, wild-eyed, “What if the Cardinal knew about the Dauphin?” Voice rising, like a child about to cry, he said. “I couldn’t protect Adele.” Turned to the wall. Turned back. “Well, what if I can’t protect my son?”

“You can’t blame yourself for this,” Athos said, grim and grave, trying to make himself a still point for Aramis to settle in.

“Who else can I blame?” Aramis asked desperately. He lifted his hand. “First Isabelle. Now Adele?” He turned to her last resting place and set his forearm against the stone, leaning into the wall. Ragged, he said, “Every woman I truly love… dies.”

“All the more reason to stay away from the Queen,” Athos warned. “And the Dauphin.” Aramis’ eyes spoke too much, they always had. Who couldn’t tell from looking at him that there was credence to any rumour that might appear… The best thing they could do right now was _stay away._ The only safety was distance and a carefully rehearsed ignorance. _It was for the best._

Aramis bowed his head.

 

**

 

_Savoy, in a corridor near the Ducal nursery, now_

 

“They wanted extra, for tonight,” Athos told the guard officer in a weary drawl, as they paused by the statue of Hypatia. “Considering.” He sighed. “Not that I’m needed.”

“You don’t belong here,” the officer insisted, his shifting grey-green eyes furious. “I don't care we didn’t get ourselves in place up here before the announcement. I won the toss and I'm doing the job.”

“You're confident.”

“You new recruits and your glory seeking. You can show some respect, you can.”

“All that you deserve, certainly.” He wondered if this was how Aramis felt, sometimes, keeping a conversation going with vague responses until it started making sense, until the other person gave something away. He wondered, given Aramis’ ‘bad days’, how often he stood in front of a stranger trying to find out what he knew, wondering if the stranger were friend, or foe, or no-one, really, at all. Aramis had made it sound like a merry game when he spoke of it - spoke of it at all.

The officer flushed.

“Cheek. Now you, sonny, are going to tidy away the bodies I left in the blue parlour and after that, if my mood has improved, I may, I _may,_ let you do the kid. Everyone knows it’ll be the Duchess with the real power.”

Bodies?

It seems luck had taken Athos into the middle of an assassination plot. “Does he feel this way all the time?” he asked the air.

“Go,” said the gruff officer, gesturing with his thumb.

Athos hissed between his teeth. “There’s just one problem,” he said mildly, and punched the man in the throat. “Tonight, I really want to hit something.”

Choking, the man stumbled backwards, around the corner to the corridor that abutted… whatever room Aramis had placed himself in, for whatever reason. Athos followed, predatory, his stalking muffled in the thick carpet.

 _“ - is my fault,_ he heard Aramis say through the half-open door as he followed the grey-haired officer, _“None of them would have been here in harm’s way, if I had kept my -”_

The officer mouthed swear-words at him through his gasping, something in Italian, Athos fancied. (The both of them were quiet, in the hall. If the native Savoyan guards were summoned, then Athos… didn’t imagine it would go well for either of them.) He grabbed the man’s collar and twisted fiercely with an iron hand. The man’s hand reached up and scrabbled at his arm. The other dipped under his uniform cloak, came out with a dagger already red with bright, fresh blood. Athos grabbed his wrist with his free hand and dug his thumb into the tender point between the tendons. The officer hissed in outrage.

 _”I absolve you of wrongdoing,”_ Aramis said through the half-open door, very calm. _“Just. Please. This time make it quick.”_

If Aramis was planning… anything like what it sounded like he was planning… Athos was going to throttle him.

The officer shuddered under his hands, under the grip of them, and Athos grinned, showing all his teeth.

A hiss of breath down the corridor and another man in Savoyan uniform, tall and skinny, with ears like jug handles under a shock of black hair, dropped the cloth he was wiping a long knife with and raced towards them, light and soundless on his feet. He didn’t raise an alarm: another assassin, then. Athos swung the officer between th-

**

In the nursery the Duchess of Savoy, who was also Princess of France, told a man come out of the night, “You assumed wrong. The mess in the courtyard has nothing to do with any ‘fishermen’, French or otherwise.”

He shut his eyes. Opened them. “Ah.” Cocked his head. “Do you want to talk about it… Christine?”

Some last thread of calm broke inside her. Her face crumpled. “Victor died. At a dinner in Vercelli, two nights ago.” She pulled her eldest living son closer against her, still covering his ears. He was only five. “I only just received word. I had them fire cannon for his passing. But I - I have to tell my children their father is dead.”

The man she was still holding at gunpoint - who she had twice sacrificed in the interest of her own life - paused, then. His eyes looked concerned. “I am sorry for your loss.” The wind blowing from the open window behind him ruffled his hair about his ears, though it was quite black behind him, the moon and her grace gone away.

“You truly did not know about this?”

He shook his head, still and steady and grave as someone trying to gentle a spooked horse. “I haven’t been in Italy in months.” His eyebrows quirked. “It is never easy to lose someone.”

“What do _you_ know about it?” she said, the words torn ragged from her throat. The gun in her hand was growing slick from the sweat in her palm.

Aramis smiled, very soft. “I know it’s never easy.”

The door to the nursery, forgotten behind them, flew open at a blow from the corridor outside. She swung around, still clutching her child, gun in hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _The under-crypt of the church_ \- I rewatched the scene in 2.01 to get the dialogue right and - _damn_. Aramis’ body-language. He doesn’t flinch at knives thrown over his shoulder or gun-barrels at the back of his neck, but a threat to a loved-one? He goes all flibberty… Also interesting: Athos knows about Isabelle, at least enough that Aramis feels he can mention her by name without further explanation. So… _some_ confiding has been going on (however desperately out-of-depth Athos might be around Feelings, he’s clearly been trying, here).
> 
> // _I had them fire cannon for his passing._ \- Technically Victor Amadeus I didn’t die until 1637, and while I’m being vague with dates in this story, that’s probably a bit late. This is a fanfic AU. Close enough. All I know is that it was at a dinner held by the Duke of Créqui, and my historical source (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Amadeus_I,_Duke_of_Savoy) makes no mention of possible poison or other foul play. _This is a fanfic AU._
> 
> Special kudos to danceswithscissors, who asked if the cannon were perhaps firing _for_ someone, either a death or an arrival. And I’m wondering if this is what AellaIrene was wondering about, when they asked about dates in an earlier comment. There is a prompt-fic for both of you, if you’re interested.


	16. "Is it done?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm messing with the structure a bit. Am trying to resolve some things!

_now, just outside the Ducal Nursery in Savoy_

 

Athos spun the grey-haired officer so that the jug-eared young man with the bloody knife sank it into him. The man under his hands gasped and shuddered, the strength of him dropping away so that he hung, shaking but unresisting, in Athos’ grasp. His friend’s knife was still caught in his body. Athos head-butted Jug-Ears then shoved the man’s dying friend at him.

He pulled a sword from the scabbard at his waist - not his, he’d had to ‘borrow’ it from the guard-room, and the weight of it dragged annoyingly at his forearm. Head ringing, he made a stop-thrust over the body, piercing Jug-Ears in the lungs. The man cried silently.

Two more in borrowed Savoyan cloaks appeared in the corridor; Athos swirled his own to sweep their blades off-line, and punched another in the throat with the pommel of his sword. He staggered backward, taking his friend with him back around the corner. 

_Squelch._ Another soft cry.

But the man coming round the corner now, still in Savoyan colours and his blade wet, was the guard captain whom Athos had last seen gently falling asleep over a few sips of drugged brandy.

His hair was in disarray, his eyes haunted. The pistol in his free hand came up.

Athos dropped the sword and raised his hands. The captain’s finger tightened on the trigger. Athos threw himself to the side against a door which, a little ajar, fell open. He stumbled through it.

He saw, in the brief quick flickers with which one read a scene during a fight - Aramis - a gun - Aramis leaning against an open window, face blank - a gun, small and dainty - a woman in a yellow dress, clutching a five-year-old child with one arm, her small and dainty gun pointed at him - Aramis diving, pulling the child away and sweeping him behind him, his own tiny pistol appearing from wherever he kept it - sharp cold metal against the back of Athos’ own neck -

The Duchess’ warm brown eyes flicked to the man behind Athos. “Stand down, Captain Filippo,” she said, sure and crisp.

The steel went away.

“Thank God we got here in time, Your Grace,” Captain Filippo said, voice shaking. “I have no explanation or excuse for letting assassins penetrate this far - the other children?”

With the five-year-old in his arms, Aramis stepped to a side-door and peered inside. “Still sleeping, quite safe,” he assured them. He booped the little boy on the nose, reassuringly. “That was quite exciting wasn’t it, Francis Hyacinth? I see how brave you are, but your mother wants to hold you.” Wild-eyed, Francis nodded and held out his arms as Christine took him back, and hid his face against her shoulder.

Captain Filippo glared at both Athos and Aramis with fury.

“You didn’t like my brandy?” Athos inquired.

Filippo nodded outside. “I recognise some of those from a Piedmontese mercenary troop,” he said. _“You_ two -”

“ - came to my assistance tonight,” said Christine crisply, as she gently stroked her son’s back, soothing him and convincing herself he was well. “Stand down, Captain Filippo.”

Peering almost absentmindedly out the open window, Aramis said, “Your Grace, I believe there is an opportunity here.” He nodded outside, to where a carriage rattled through the night, its flickering running lanterns illuminating Ducal heraldry. He smiled, or at least, showed his teeth.

**

It was still in the nursery, and silent, all that was illuminated by a lone candle in the little gracious room was a great pool of spreading red on the floor.

“Is it done?” came a hoarse whisper.

“I think so.”

 _“Such_ a tragedy. To arrive _so close_ and yet _too late_ to avert disaster. Our dear, dear sister-in-law. Our beloved _nephew._ I could weep…”

The shutter came off the lantern and doors opened. Soldiers in Savoyan colours filed in from both doors, to surround two men, with a cast to their features reminiscent of Victor of Savoy, and with wind-blown hair and clothes carrying dirt from the road.

Christine of France, Duchess of Savoy came in also, her eldest child still in her arms. “Your tears are premature, dear brothers,” she said, her voice low and rich. “But I appreciate the sentiment all the same.”

One pulled an ecclesiastical skullcap off his head and clutched it, closing his eyes and lifting his face upwards as if in silent prayer. The other, burly as a soldier, said, “Christine, thank God you and our dear nephew are safe. Maurizio and I could not have borne it if - if - so soon after our brother passed. As soon as we got wind of the assassination plot, _we came._ Are you well, Christine?”

“Maurice, Thomas,” she said, gravely. “I am all the stronger for the support of my brothers-in-law.” 

“We were so worried we would not get here in time,” Maurizio said anxiously.

“The Lord commended angels to safeguard my children and I,” she said, sweet and solemn. Maurizio threw up his hands to the heavens. “No doubt,” Christine added, “the angels will look in again from time to time, to guard my children’s safety and punish their enemies.” And she smiled, small and sweet.

Her brother-in-law Thomas paled, his face taking on the ill colour of curdled milk. Maurizio met her eyes. “Indeed, sister, indeed.” He looked through the crowd and his eyes settled on Aramis and Athos, who stood so near the Duchess. 

“Merely two benighted travellers seeking shelter from the night, Your Highness,” Aramis said, sketching the tiniest bow, with his eyes fixed on Prince Maurizio’s face. “We commend the Duchess on her pious charity.”

“You know what they say about hospitality to strangers,” Athos said, a lump of flint more expressive than his features.

“Indeed,” Maurizio said. “I trust the road will speed your going.”

The Duchess addressed one of her guard captains. “Have rooms made up for my brothers-in-law in the East Tower at the other end of the chateau. You will like it there,” she informed Maurizio and Thomas gravely. “The light is so lovely in the mornings. It will be a good place to stop for a while.”

“Indeed,” said Maurizio, his face expressionless.

Athos’ eyes flicked to Aramis. He was chalky under his tan, as if the colour had been painted on along with his gentle smile, and Athos suspected his position by the solid nursery table was more so that he could discretely lean his hip against it than any other reason. “Your Grace,” Athos said smoothly, “of your courtesy. It troubles us to intrude on a family matter and we beg leave to depart tonight. With our companions. If it pleases.” 

She nodded very, very slightly. “I’ll have a man escort you out the back way.” 

At the door they stopped at her call: “Wait!” She pulled her personal signet ring off her finger and tossed it to Aramis, who almost fumbled the catch. “It is a small thing, but it will fend off trouble on the road.”

He looked at the slip of gold and carved topaz in his hand, and then bowed deeply. Athos caught him by the shoulder as he staggered.

 

**

 

_the camp in the woods, half an hour later_

 

At the end of it all, what does one have?

Athos crouched by the ashes of the dead fire - all the coals had gone out with the smothering he’d given them, what, only hours ago? Painfully, methodically, he struck flint against steel and scattered sparks into a few dry, dead scraps of tinder. His hands shook from weariness, as if he’d been riding a night and fighting a day, and it all to do over tomorrow.

Aramis was behind him, he thought. The man hadn’t said a word since the courtyard, after what had passed at the little, unobtrusive, dull iron grate that covered over the hell he’d bided in, the last scraps of heat and fire in him quite gone out. 

But he had followed Athos, out into the parkland around the chateau and then into the woods, only a few brushes of his feet against the ground betraying his presence. Athos had not dared turn around, superstitious, afraid that a look back would only net him a last glimpse of his friend that faded into nothing with the dawn of the day.

“Is this wise, my friend?” Aramis said in a hush.

Athos drew in a breath, let it out. A tiny flame danced in the tinder.

“I’m not giving you my eyes. Not yet.”

Athos’ head snapped around. Aramis sat with his back to a tree. One arm, his left, was out-stretched. On his wrist perched a large, fat raven, and they watched each other.

 _“Get out of here,”_ Athos snarled, throwing a stick at the bird. It hopped off, lazily flapping to a branch above them, staring insolently.

Aramis stared at him with mild reproof. “It is the bird’s home, not ours, Athos. And he harms only the dead.”

Picking rocks and sticks from the ground Athos rousted the bird, roaring and throwing anything that came to hand until he could no longer see it in the pre-dawn darkness. He could feel it though, in the woods, watching. His scarred lip curled, but he turned back to carefully feeding twigs to the tiny phoenix-fire.

“Your volubility,” said Aramis, oddly cheerful, “was always something I loved about you, Athos.” Into the silence he added, “I thought last night went quite well.” 

Athos looked over his shoulder. Aramis continued, putting an airy cloak over the remoteness in his eyes. “A fair lady saved, and her children, and evil machinations no doubt foiled for the evening. You’re a natural for the miracle trade, my friend.”

“I heard you talking with the Duchess,” Athos answered, small and precise as a poniard.

“I am charming, am I not?”

“You were sitting in the window, _daring_ her to shoot you.”

“Athos,” Aramis said patiently, “I had a steel plate hidden in my clothes. And I have survived far worse tumbles than out that window. _Heu,_ you didn’t think I was serious?”

Athos hissed like a kettle, boiling up off the ground and hauling Aramis up against the trunk of the fir tree. Aramis’ eyes slitted, but he did not resist as Athos ripped open Aramis’ plain black doublet, spilling buttons. “A steel plate, you said?” His voice was rich with menace. All that was under Aramis’ doublet was a fine cambric shirt, sodden with sweat. 

Aramis looked away. “It must have dropped out.” His hands worked in the air. “And wasn't I always meant to die here, Athos? All those years ago? I am an error in the world, inviting darkness. Bad luck. I've finished nearly all the business I can. Maybe it were better to end it that way.”

Athos shook him. Aramis moved with it, boneless and unresisting. _”I don’t know what to do,”_ Athos hissed. “Aramis.” His voice cracked and his friend looked at him, startled. Athos’ face crumpled. “Aramis, how do I keep you?”

Aramis’ hand came up and patted him lightly on the back in automatic comfort. “Don’t be sad,” he said.

Athos’ hand stole up to the back of Aramis’ neck and pulled him closer, until they were forehead to forehead, breathing the same air.

A crack of a breaking twig and they both turned, almost sick with weariness, but dragging themselves to alertness once more.

“You lot are alright,” said Porthos, still as a statue in the shadows among the trees.

Another twig-crack and he called over his shoulder, “‘Born poacher,’ you said. ‘All Gascons see in the dark,’ you said.”

“Do _you_ want to carry him?” d’Artagnan called from the trees.

 _“Hell_ no,” Porthos spat.

“Well then.” The Gascon faded out of the trees, a withered, filthy old man wrapped in rags clinging to his back, eyes the only bright thing about him. D’Artagnan shuddered underneath him. “I’m putting him down now,” he declared, tossing his head as if to make a joke of it, “and you can’t stop me.”

From his perch on d’Artagnan’s back, the old man looked at Athos and Aramis assessingly.

“Good boy,” said Cardinal Richelieu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // We'll catch up on what d'Art and Porthos and Armand were up to next chapter, in another flashback. Yay for anachronic order.
> 
> // _“Good boy,” said Cardinal Richelieu._
> 
> Time for a small poll, I guess:
> 
> A - I’m really glad Richelieu is alive  
> B - I really want to punch Richelieu  
> C - Both A and B
> 
> // _where two men, with a cast to their features reminiscent of Victor of Savoy_ \- Oh my God, I was going to blame the assassination attempt on Mantua or maybe generic Piedmontese, but turns out there are ready-made Evil Uncles right there for my use. Maurizio/Maurice was a Cardinal, Thomas was a soldier who sometimes fought for Spain. They started up a civil war with Christine ~~after the death of Francis Hyacinth, pah, who needs history the kid’ll be fine~~ a few years later, _which she won._ She stayed on as either Regent or unofficial ruler until her dying day. While having, apparently, several known lovers. Go Christine!
> 
> I apologise if this assassination attempt was resolved too quickly. If I’m not ruthless with subplots, this story _will never end._ (I mean, mostly it was there so WeeMad!Athos could hit something. He’s been wanting to hit something for a while now. My heart bled.) 
> 
> // _“You know what they say about hospitality to strangers.”_ \- Hebrews 13:2 “And hospitality do not forget: for by this some, being not aware of it, have entertained angels.”
> 
> // _Athos hadn’t dared turn around, superstitious..._ \- he was thinking of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.


	17. "Getting worse."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // Change of plan! What I thought was the reasonable choice of skipping back to how Porthos, d’Art, and Richelieu (the merry trio) escaped turned out to be Terrible, No-Good, Utterly Foolish and Conducive to Writer’s Block, so I’m rerouting and hopefully we’ll get back to it. Instead… more feelings. Gah.

_on the border between France and Savoy, days ago_

 

“He’s getting worse.”

Porthos shifted his weight awkwardly, careful not to jostle in the narrow single bed that had become, in the middle of the night, a double. Aramis’ neat beard scratched at the column of his throat, and a wiry arm was flung across Porthos’ chest. He was talking in his sleep, or mumbling, rather, passing half-formed phrases in Latin through his lips. It might be a prayer.

“He trusts us,” said Athos, slouched, legs stretched out, in a black-wooden chair by the last dying coals in the grate. The low light made the lines of his face saturnine, somber. “He trusts us to see weakness now.”

“And he’s getting worse,” volunteered d’Artagnan softly, resting on one elbow in a roll of blankets on the floor.

Quietly, Aramis began to whimper in his sleep like a kicked dog. “Shh,” murmured Porthos, lifting his hand to rub between his friend’s shoulder-blades. Aramis froze, rigid and silent, the sound choked off. Still sleeping he rolled off Porthos, carefully, as if not to offend. “Shit,” breathed Porthos, shifting his hand to his friend’s hip to keep him from falling onto the floor. Aramis lay taut and still under his hand, shivering. “I hate her,” he told Athos. “Simple as that. I hate your wife.”

Athos stood, and moved to crouch by the bed. Frowning thoughtfully he took Aramis’ wrist and slipped a thumb under the faded blue ribbon. As he rubbed against the inner wrist the man relaxed all of a sudden, whatever dream-path he’d stumbled on reaching an endpoint. Porthos gathered him into his arms again. “I don’t know what this is,” Athos breathed, “but I don’t think it’s one of… her… nightmares.”

In the quiet of the night Porthos said, eyes flat and uncompromising, “I hate her.”

 

**

 

_the campsite outside the chateau, now_

 

“You’re still dead,” Aramis told Richelieu pleasantly, turning and stepping away from Athos. “It’s too late, and your funeral was quite distressingly gaudy. The King does not need to be troubled on your account. But Treville has promised a chair by a kitchen fire somewhere… out of the way, if you tell him where the bodies are buried.”

“You _know_ where the bodies are buried,” said Richelieu, as d’Artagnan lowered him to a seat on a gnarled and thick tree-root, lips pulling back to show his teeth. “You found _me.”_

“That I did.” Aramis tipped a brief mocking bow. “You are most welcome.”

“Took your time, boy.”

“You know what they say about the best humble pie - the offal needs to simmer a good long time.” He gestured with one hand, “Take your ease, I beg.” He turned away, turned back: “Ah! Bless my forgetfulness… Mad- Milady de Winter sends her regards though, alas, she had other business which precluded her presence. She was so looking forward to the entertainment, too.” He clicked his tongue in regret and turned to crouch by the little flickering, rekindled fire.

“Settle down, Aramis,” Richelieu said, eyes hooded, pulling the last of his tattered robes about him. He was answered with a soft laugh.

“How did you get in?” Aramis asked Porthos, as the big man joined him in feeding the fire.

“Thing with a haycart, before the gates shut,” said Porthos, flicking his eyes to where Athos leaned, saturnine, against a tree and d’Artagnan paced, twitching his shoulders under his cloak.

“And out?”

Porthos’ mouth flattened. “Thing with a carriage.” He watched Aramis pour the contents of a water-skin into a copper pot and hang it over the yellow and red flames. “I heard you and Athos talking… you asked the Duchess to shoot you?”

“What a night for eavesdroppers,” said Aramis lightly. “There’s no privacy, none.”

 _“Aramis,”_ he growled.

“It was a worst-case scenario, necessitated only,” he said precisely, “because I was not let be to do what has been my _actual job_ for the last _year.”_

“You didn’t see yourself. You were fading in and out. We agreed you’d stay at camp, this time.”

Aramis clucked his tongue again. “Where’s the trust in my skills? My judgement?”

“Are we just sidekicks to you? To be left with the baggage in case we’re troublesome when we get ideas?”

“I respect your ideas,” Aramis said shortly. “I respect your life more.”

“Not your own, though.”

Aramis twitched. “Athos has already had this out. Let be?” He tested the heat of the pot with his fingers then stood rapidly, shaking his head until he got his balance, and stalked to the baggage pile. He stooped, rummaged in his gear, then stood again, squeezing his eyes shut and clutching at a tree trunk for balance. He muttered under his breath in Spanish.

"Sit down,” growled Porthos.

“It’s fine,” said Aramis.

“You are about. To fall over.”

“Since I clearly don’t have my strength back,” Aramis said smiling, “I pray you, stay your wrath until another day.” Porthos’ mouth clicked shut.

Aramis returned to the fire and unhooked the pot, a bundle tucked awkwardly under his arm. More gently, Porthos said, “You owe him nothing.” His eyes flicked to the old man, watchful as a ragged owl. _“Nothing.”_

“Ah, so?” Aramis’ lips flickered. A knife dropped into his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _the best humble pie_ \- ‘humble’, ‘numble’, or ‘umble’ pie is literally pie made from the entrails of a hunted deer. Figuratively, it’s an aphorism for exercising humility. I’m not sure it's actually a pun that works in French but please humour me. Translation convention etc. etc. 
> 
> http://www.grouprecipes.com/98487/humble-pie.html
> 
> http://www.culinarylore.com/food-history:eating-humble-pie


	18. "Precariously."

_years ago, the Bonacieux residence_

 

The upper room was fairly bare - a bedstead, a dresser, a chest for clothes and other gear. Aramis noted with absentminded approval that d’Artagnan was the kind of bachelor who turned neat, not slovenly. Well. The boy likely spent the majority of his home time downstairs, in the kitchen, ‘helping’ his pretty landlady with her chores.

Marsac’s hands shook under Aramis’ touch, a low, unnoticed tremor. There was a smell to him: gunpowder, and the musk of the badly cured leathers over his shoulders, old sweat. Fear. He hunched over unresisting on d’Artagnan’s bed, the flash of whimsy as he’d burbled about his artistry in cabinet-making sunk back into weariness as Aramis knotted the cords and cut the rope.

“I’ve thought of you many times,” Aramis said softly, sheathing his dagger and touching Marsac’s shoulder, “wondered how you were living.”

Marsac stared down at him with bright, bird eyes out of a face gone prematurely old. Christ, he was thin. “Precariously,” he said at last. “A musket for hire, with thieves for company and one eye on the door. I'm weary of it.”

“Your name is held in contempt amongst your old comrades,” Aramis told him reluctantly. “You're a coward and a deserter. For that alone, you're under sentence of death.”

 _“No-one has the right to judge me!”_ Marsac flared, then, more soft, “You alone know what really happened.” And he was right. Already that time was passing out of memory - the grief turning into a blank symbol for the new Musketeers to learn as a myth and rallying cry, and the living men who breathed and laughed and travelled the earth were unimportant in that tale. Treville might remember all their names, he thought, and Serge. A few of the older veterans had had friends that they still drank to, after Easter Mass, but they were going as surely as the tide ate at the shore. One day all that would be left was Aramis…

He stood up and turned to go, side-excursion ended in the name of doing his duty - whatever that was.

“Treason can’t go unpunished,” Marsac told him, stern as a dead man giving warning. “The lives of our dead friends must be avenged.”

 

**

 

_Savoy, the campsite, now_

 

Richelieu eyed the little knife in Aramis’ hand as he paced towards him, a bundle of cloth under his arm and a copper pot of water in his other hand.

“I know that weapon,” he said slowly.

“Ah?” Aramis dropped the bundle and examined it - a long thin blade and a jewelled hit, delicate and beautiful. “It used to pin up hair, but the owner wanted me to have something to remember her by.”

“Milady de Winter.”

“She has many names.” Aramis’ lips flickered and he tucked his legs underneath him on the ground like a tailor, setting the pot beside him. “There is a story behind that one.”

“Are you going to cut my throat?”

“That’s the first thing you ask?” For some reason Richelieu smiled at that, letting Aramis take one of his hands, hooked and gnarled and taloned, setting the knife’s fine edge to a thick nail.

“This isn’t a time for _lex talionis,”_ Aramis said reflectively, paring it back. “If you do anything but walk away quietly, the door in the mountains that is Savoy will open, and everything, _dominie,_ that has been sacrificed to keep it closed will become ash, thrown in the wind, to no purpose. Do you understand?” 

“I haven’t lost my wits.”

Richelieu watched in silence as Aramis trimmed his nails, then retrieved a sponge from the bundle of cloth. He dipped it in the tepid water, rubbed it on a block of soap, and scrubbed up his arm under the rags. “Why?”

“Why so long to come back? Why at all? Ah.” Aramis looked down at the sponge from which he was squeezing dirty water. “You may not have noticed -” he wrinkled his nose - “but you come with an odour.” He finished cleaning Richelieu’s arms and then his feet and legs, hands calm, competent, and impersonal. Handing him the sponge to finish the job, he opened the rest of the bundle, showing a long linsey-woolsey shirt and drawers, hose, light cloth breeches. They were all old, the clothes, washed and beaten to softness, but neatly darned and very, very clean. He considered them, then Richelieu, and said, “Hair first.” He picked up scissors. “Head forward, please.”

“Aramis the barber,” Richelieu said, as greasy locks of horse-coarse hair fell around his shoulders. 

After a time Aramis said, “Well. I like to be tidy.” He sponged the old man’s new-shorn hair and clipped beard as best as he could. “We’ll find you a real bath soon enough.” 

There was a gentle sobbing sound as he eased the long shirt over Richelieu’s head. Perhaps it was laughter. Even so, he waited until Richelieu was ready to show his face again, busying himself with bundling up the stinking rags and hair and throwing them, left-handed, as far as he could into the night forest.

“Perhaps I wanted to tie off a loose end,” he said when the sobbing had stopped, looking into the darkness. “Or put a nightmare to bed.” He glanced at the old man, sitting still and hunched on the twisted tree-root, watching the Musketeers quietly moving about the vigorous fire at the centre of the camp.

“I will grant that I desired the answers to some questions,” he continued, “ones that I doubt Treville would be concerned with.”

“I’ll trade you three,” said the old man, still looking at the fire, so that the moving light of the flame traced fingers of shadow in the corrugations of his face. Aramis had honestly forgotten how beaky his nose was, and the jut of his Adam’s Apple in his bare throat as he swallowed.

“Answered without let or hindrance, mental reservation, or any other mendacity,” Aramis clarified.

“Agreed. Where are you hurt?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your hands are still shaking.”

Aramis looked down. “Ah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm honestly curious, how many readers thought Aramis was going to do something sinister, vs. hair-cutting.
> 
> // _lex talionis_ \- the law of retaliation, "an eye for an eye"
> 
> // _mental reservation_ \- telling the truth with intent to deceive, basically.
> 
> "Mental reservation is a form of deception which is not an outright lie. It was argued for in moral theology, and now in ethics, as a way to fulfill obligations both to tell the truth and to keep secrets from those not entitled to know them (for example, because of the seal of the confessional or other clauses of confidentiality). Mental reservation, however, is regarded as unjustifiable without grave reason for withholding the truth. This condition was necessary to preserve a general idea of truth in social relations."
> 
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_reservation


	19. "My part in it does not signify."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I thought we might all be forgetting the ‘murder’ in ‘murder kitten’. (I hope the swerves in the chapter don't make anyone seasick.)

_weeks ago, the Red Dovecote Inn_

 

“You never said why.”

Aramis opened his eyes. “Hm? Why the rain falls…? Why Porthos and d'Artagnan have gone riding? Why a cabbage?”

“Why you killed the Bishop of Vannes.”

Aramis turned his head on the lavender-scented pillow. Athos was not in his usual spot, between Aramis’ bed and the door, but settled to the side. His lion’s-mane hair fell around his ears as he frowned over a little clothbound book.

“I wondered if de Vannes had… hurt you. Or -”

“You ask outrageous questions, Captain.” Nap over, Aramis stretched languidly as a cat in the sun, wiggling his toes under the light blanket.

Without looking up, Athos said, “Do you wish to speak of it?”

“Ohhh…?” Aramis purred. “Do you, as Porthos, wish an accounting of my reasons? Perhaps a story, to entertain.”

“Neither. But if you wish to speak I will listen.” Athos turned a page.

Aramis hitched up on one elbow and studied Athos’ face intently as the man stared at his book, frowning and quiet.

In the warm silence he set at last, like a piece on a chessboard, “De Vannes hurt a lot of people, some of them quite young, who do not need a stain on their garment.”

“So, privacy,” answered Athos, the gravel in his voice softened under velvet.

“Mn,” grunted Aramis. “It's not a pretty story, or particularly original, and my part in it does not signify, except insofar as I was present at the ending.” He settled back on the bed, hands folded neatly on his belly.

“Everybody loved him, you see. Those who didn’t were no-account sinners or soon became so, their character and reputation and prosperity transformed in the flicker of an eyelash.” He grinned sharply as he stared up at the plaster ceiling. “The miracle of transfiguration as practiced by the church.”

“No recourse in the courts, I take it.”

“Sometimes the only justice is rogues in the night. Sometimes there is no justice at all: only violence or a forced, gagging peace. But my actions seemed good to me at the time. I do not regret them.”

A rustle of sheets.

“Athos. It is kind of you to worry about Madame.”

Athos looked up. His friend had propped himself up on his elbow and was watching him with calm dark eyes, his shirt falling loose and his curls of hair rumpled from sleep. He smiled gently. Athos was reminded of the pistol Aramis used to carry, a thing of great beauty with a polished haft and elaborate ornamentation on the barrel, carried with such apparently careless ease that one nearly forgot the empty place inside, the void made for fire, and metal, and death. He beckoned, and Athos came.

“She used to talk in the night,” Aramis said, eyes dreamy. “Sometimes she'd kill her lovers - in their sleep if they were lucky.” He reached and tipped up Athos’ chin with one warm fingertip then touched a point on his throat. “A bodkin here will steal the voice and the air but leave a man alive a while, to understand the journey he is about to make. She said she enjoyed that.” He moved to Athos’ hand, prying the fingers loose one by one from the tight fist he had unconsciously formed and digging his thumb into the sword-callused palm to ease its tension. “She's mellowed considerably, since her days on the government payroll.”

He released his friend and settled back down, shutting his eyes.

 

**

 

_now, Savoy, the campsite_

 

“This is a desecration.”

From his vantage by the fire Porthos looked away as Aramis guided the old man’s hand inside the hanging sides of his torn-open doublet to touch his ribs through the shirt. “He’s letting that - he’s letting him touch him.”

“And I thought I was jealous of _Constance’s_ affection,” d’Artagnan breathed, standing beside him.

Porthos glared up at him. “Have I ever stood in the way of a lover who wasn’t set to get us all hanged for treason? I have not.”

“I’m sure he still loves you best,” d’Artagnan answered, lightly jibing. “Well. Mostly best. Well he puts up with _me_ and I put up with him and, Porthos, that’s a lot of bickering without a deep and unknowable affection to smooth things over. I feel very warm, thinking about it.”

“I’ll break your pretty nose,” Porthos said without heat. “I am not a possessive man.”

D’Artagnan barked with laughter.

“You love him, and these days, sometimes, it’s only his shirt-collar that smiles at you. Of course it hurts.” He sipped some reheated soup. “He near ripped Athos’ head off, once, for being careless with your safety. Me too.” He drank again - it was good soup. “... Sorry about that.”

“It was years ago,” Porthos said absently, stirring a clay pot of steeping herbs with a peeled twig.

D'Artagnan watched as Aramis took the old man’s hand from his hip - there was some scarring there, he recalled - and lifted it to the back of his head, tipping his head forward as the old man laced fingers through his hair. “No, you’re right: this is actually making my skin crawl. Is that tisane done?” Porthos handed up the pot without looking, keeping his gaze on the fire as d'Artagnan moved away.

“I thought the lover they had in common was called Adele?” the Gascon called, coming back empty-handed.

“Yeah,” said Porthos levelly. “Must've been something to talk about down there.”

“So who's Josefina?”

“He never stepped out with a Josefina. That I heard of. Or, wait. Shit.” Porthos looked up and stared at the pair of them talking quietly. “Maybe,” he said hesitantly, “maybe that's his... Shit.”

On the twisted tree-root at the edge of the camp, Richelieu said, gently, “Aramis. Do you really _want_ to know a family who would turn out a sixteen-year-old girl for a thickened waist?”

“Even so.”

“It was decades ago, boy. If I ever knew your mother's family name it’s long gone. You will understand that genealogy was not my primary concern?”

“I understand.” Aramis cocked his head like a bird. “Did you kill her?”

Richelieu shook his head. “I’m not a monster. Not that kind of a monster. Not then. She had a disease of the lungs: she was slow in dying, but it took her in the end... You had the mind that God granted a stone, Aramis, when I talked about her down there.”

“Perhaps not _quite_ that petrous.”

"She was ferociously bright, as I recall. Educated: the conversation was at least half the attraction. I’ll spare you the intimate details.” A mirthless smile flickered on Aramis’ lips. “Her accent was of Seville,” Richelieu said thoughtfully.

“There were…” Aramis looked away, then down at the steaming tisane in his hands. After time he said, “I think I remember other children?”

“Decades ago,” Richelieu grumbled. “I visited that house maybe three or four times a year with other things on my mind. You understand.” He tilted his head back, eyes half-shut, and said, “Your older sister was Maria de Pilar. The other had an unfortunate beak for a nose, I forget her name.”

After a silence he added, “The house was closed for sickness, one time I visited. I did not see them about in the brothel's garden, after that.”

After another silence he said, “Are you satisfied?”

Aramis put down the tisane and rose up on one knee. He set his fingers lightly to Richelieu’s temples and searched his face with black eyes. After a time he sat back down. “I am.”

“I warned you would not like the answer.”

“You did. Your next question?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _”it’s only his shirt-collar that smiles at you._ \- line purloined without regret from _Lucky Number Slevin,_ a movie rich in vivid dialogue. And wallpaper.
> 
> **
> 
> Oh my, 19 chapters?
> 
> We're nearly done, I promise.


	20. "I see."

_years ago, a border skirmish_

 

“A little help here?” Porthos growled. He sighted through the fog of sulphurous smoke, the ubiquitous reek left behind by black powder, and spied figures moving. He shot - an arquebus in his right hand, a pistol in his left. Perversely it was the pistol, with a shorter range and a less-dextrous hand on it, that made its mark. The man fell. The other, and the friend beside him, fired, still coming on. Porthos ducked behind a high stone wall and watched a ball strike chips from the rough barricade he’d sheltered behind. He’d been in worse engagements, it was true. And yet…

Beside him, sheltered even further by the wall, Aramis loaded another arquebus, fingers quick and nimble on the ramrod as he sent the powder and ball and wadding down the barrel. He ducked his head, his curly hair hiding his eyes. Without looking up, he shoved the gun into Porthos’ grimy hand and picked up another from its place against the stone. “You’ve got this,” he said, his lips curling into an easy grin. “I believe in you.”

Porthos breathed in, breathed out, fired: a scatter of smoke and fire and a man fell. _”Godammit,_ Aramis. Will the genius marksman come out to play?”

He heard his friend chortle. “You admitted I’m a genius. _Finally._ I shall treasure this moment always, my brother.” Porthos reached, felt the butt of a pistol in his hand, and another. Fired.

“I wouldn’t want to spoil your big moment,” Aramis said modestly. “And besides, I just bought this coat: how could I sully it?” His fingers worked on the long musket, their best gun, with a good steel barrel and an oiled stock finished like silk.

“When this is over,” Porthos said, low and serious, “we are going to have a good, long discussion about soldiers keeping under cover in battle while their comrades take the heat.”

“I look forward to it,” Aramis said, fumbling in the choking smoke for the empty gun in Porthos’ hand, “but for now just shoot… Unless you think it beyond your capacities?” he asked, gently jibing.

Porthos growled again and fired. And then the last of the militia was upon him and he fought, hand to hand, with his good steel sword slicing sinews and hacking armour, kicking to the kneecaps and smashing teeth with his pommel. He fought brilliantly. He fought alone. One last shot, nowhere near him, the choking sigh of a man dying around his blade, and it was over.

In the quiet, he lowered his sword, feeling the air course through the bellows of his chest, triumphant and also, a little, sad. He’d thought, when he joined the Regiment, that he’d reached the end of it - not taking the brunt of the fighting, but taking the brunt _alone_ while officers and painted popinjays hovered out-of-sight until it was time to collect the glory, never able to trust someone to have his back. He should have known the perfumed libertine who’d ‘befriended’ him was no different…

A half-step in the powder-smoke, the shadow of a figure, clutching two pistols, one smoking. A hesitant voice: “Porthos?”

“Yeah?” he asked grimly. “You got something to say?”

“Could I trouble you for the loan of a handkerchief?” Aramis stepped closer, his head turning back and forth blind as a worm. His face passed through light cast by a burning watermill and Porthos saw the blood, streaming down from a gash in his forehead and sealing shut his eyes with a dark crust. “It’s just,” he apologised, “that I lent my last out to an acquaintance, funny story that -”

Porthos swore and grabbed his chin, turning it so he could seal the wound with the bandanna pulled from his scalp.

“It’s fine,” Aramis protested, though he held still under Porthos’ rough ministrations. “Head wounds are the devil, that’s all.”

“You should’ve said something,” Porthos said grimly.

Aramis grinned, warm and a little wild, and holstered a pistol that he might reach out a hand stained with his own blood and trace his fingers down the embossed leather pauldron on Porthos’ shoulder. “I knew you could do it.” His smile fell. “Though I wish I had seen. You sounded magnificent.”

“I’ll tell you in the tavern. Tonight. You’re buying.”

Aramis laughed, clear and bright. “But of course.”

 

**

 

_now, the campsite_

 

“Your next question?” Aramis asked politely.

Richelieu’s eyes hooded. “You carry an assassin’s dagger, yet you travel with members of your old Regiment… unless they’ve resigned.” He glanced over Aramis’ shoulder to where Porthos and d’Artagnan bickered quietly by the fire. “There’s a story, there.”

“If you wish to hear it…”

“No,” continued Richelieu thoughtfully. “I would like to hear of the state and disposition of the French royal family.”

Aramis cocked one eyebrow. “Elisabeth of France has become very Spanish: she looks good in black. Henrietta Marie continues rather French: she favours blue and red and her husband is charmed by this. Christine of Savoy… attains, for the well-being of her son, the Regency, after her husband’s recent death.”

 _“So,”_ Richelieu breathed.

“So,” Aramis answered.

“The boys,” Richelieu asked urgently.

Aramis’ eyes flickered in amusement. “Gaston, Monsieur le Prince, remains in discreet exile, the last I heard. His older brother, Feron of the Bourbon bones, is in attendance on our most gracious King and much-loved for his clever advice, and his sense of humour.

“Louis,” he added, “I met at the end of the campaign season, at the head of the army. I think,” he said hesitantly, furrowing his brows, “I think perhaps he might be taking some of his brother’s extract of opium.”

“Why do you think that?”

Aramis’ hand swooped up and down like a little sparrow.

“He was always whimsical. What else?”

“Didn’t he used to take rose-pastilles for his breath? He smells of horehound, now, lots of it, and a little of his brother’s poppy.”

“Cough medicine.”

Aramis drummed his fingers on the earth. “It might just be a seasonal cold,” he offered.

“And yet.” Richelieu passed a hand across his eyes. He lowered it and looked away. “He used to play the lute, did you know? He gave it up for hunting, and because he did not want to be reminded of Marie. He used to stammer...” When he turned back his eyes were hot and fiery. “Who is his heir?” he asked, low and urgent. “Is it Gaston?”

Aramis shut his own eyes, and breathed in the smell of the night - the resin of the fir trees, the dampness, bitter smoke from the fire as a chance gust of wind sent it their way, and over the top of that the richness of pipe tobacco. “The heir is also Louis,” he said, forcing his voice into blandness. “A stout boy not yet in breeches, with his mother’s light hair and dark eyes for his father.”

Richelieu cupped Aramis’ cheek with his hand, over a scar that had almost lost its redness, and looked carefully into his eyes. In the dimness they were wide and open.

“I see,” he said at last. “I am satisfied with your answer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _He smells of horehound_ \- horehound can be used as a flavouring for candy, but also has medicinal uses, including helping coughs. Some forms of laudanum can ease a cough, as well as for pain relief and, er, recreational use.


	21. "A lesson in remembrance."

_two days ago, the French-Savoy border_

 

“This is morbid,” d’Artagnan muttered.

“You’re welcome to turn back,” said Aramis, pacing through the moonlit woods.

“Uh-uh.” _Carry the matagot straight home,_ d’Artagnan thought, _without looking back once, and it will be your friend._ “You aren’t home yet,” he said aloud.

“What’s that?” asked Aramis.

D’Artagnan drew breath and let it out as he followed the other man into a clearing. “If you’re not there when they wake up, they’ll worry.”

“I won’t be long,” Aramis promised. “Don’t fret.”

The clearing, the site of the Massacre of Savoy, was different from how d’Artagnan had pictured. There was no snow, for one, and it was larger than he’d thought, with a ragged tree-verge encroaching on the open space. There was no sign of old tent pegs, or a place where a fire might have been lit.

“After Marsac - after Marsac was done,” d’Artagnan said in a rush, “we thought you’d found some kind of peace. We didn’t want to poke you where it hurt so we didn’t -”

“Don’t fret,” said Aramis peacefully, “I understand what happened. Besides, it’s gauche to bleed in public.” D’Artagnan’s jaw tightened.

“There was a man called away from a feast,” Aramis continued, looking around, “who survived when the feasting-hall fell in. When they couldn’t identify the bodies he walked in memory through the night before, about the table where each sat in ease and camaraderie, and so he gave them back their names.” He paced to the centre and with deliberation put down a little white stone on the damp earth. “Carpentier, big man, laughed like a donkey.” Another. “Moreau-the-Younger, hair like a buttercup, followed his brother into the service.” Another: “Jean-Baptiste Garnier, who was christened Jeanne-Marie - _shh.”_ He held a finger up to his lips, dark eyes sly. “Not even Treville knew that last. Rode like a centaur.” He set down more stones, each with a name and a scrap of remembrance.

“You and your trick memory,” d’Artagnan said wryly as he leaned against a tree with his long arms wrapped about his torso.

“It’s technique, only,” Aramis answered. “I had some training in my youth, that’s all.”

“Are you any happier for doing this?” d’Artagnan asked, very blunt.

“If I don’t remember them, who will?” Aramis’ black eyes grew mocking. “Unless you want a lesson in remembrance, Gascon? Care to give it a try? Think you can _manage?”_

D’Artagnan’s eyes narrowed. _“Watch me.”_

 

**

 

_now, the campsite_

 

“Do you understand… what you did with Adele, now?”

“Spite,” said Richelieu promptly, folding his hands in front of him.

“So blunt, _dominie.”_

“If I’d had my wits about me I would have turned her. Imagine the intelligence to be had from the mistress of one of Treville’s favourite soldiers… but I was hurting, and angry.” He clicked his tongue ruefully. “If I had asked her to betray you, and she had done it…”

“She might have lived,” Aramis said mildly.

“If she had betrayed you.”

“But she would be alive.”

“Soft-hearted boy.” Something flared in Richelieu’s eyes.

“And… the message? After the end?”

A line formed in Richelieu’s wrinkled face. “More spite,” he said softly, “when I thought I was dying and had nothing personally to lose. And perhaps, perhaps I thought someone needed a lesson in _discretion,_ considering the situation he appeared to be in.”

Aramis’ head reared back.

“Your eyes, boy, are alarmingly easy to read when one knows what to look for.”

Aramis’ mouth firmed and he twitched his shoulders, but settled. “You buried her neatly,” he added, eyes distant, reading a barely remembered scene. “Her name and her death-date and when she was born…”

“It was not just _you_ who needed a lesson, Aramis.”

“So.”

_“So.”_

“She was a _very_ good actress.”

“She was.”

For a breath the ghost of a woman hovered between them, with sun-bright hair and a humorous mouth, and fearless eyes.

 _“Requiescat in pace,”_ said the Cardinal at last, “if she can forgive me.”

“I am satisfied with your answer,” Aramis said, with an odd sense of ritual, “though I cannot speak for Adele.”

Richelieu nodded briefly.

Aramis looked away, into the shadows between the trees.

“Does the darkness ever leave you?”

Aramis looked back to the old man, freshly scrubbed but old and worn and tired, oblivious to the cold of the night.

“The stain of that place… of hell,” the Richelieu clarified. "Does it fall away?"

Twitching his lips in a half-smile, Aramis said, “I am a practical man, _dominie.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to fight hard not to have him ask about the rumour that Treville and Richelieu had hate-sex every Tuesday afternoon. That would be inappropriate at this time.
> 
> // _Carry the matagot straight home_ \- D’Artagnan mentions the mategot wizard-cat in “Hard Roads, Curious Travellers II”
> 
> // There’s more detail on Simonides’ Memory Palace technique in “Brewer’s Boy” by the very talented Daisy Ninja Girl.
> 
> // Moreau-the-Younger comes from “All the Lost Children”. I borrowed Jean-Baptiste/Jeanne-Marie from the back-story of a different continuity, “Never A Love Story”. Because why not?


	22. "A practical man."

_Venice, in winter_

 

Madame skidded five more pearls across the oiled wood of the table and added them to the pile. A stray lock of inky hair slipped, curling, from the loose braid slung over her shoulder and she tucked it, absent-minded, behind her ear before continuing the story that had interrupted an afternoon’s tallying of loot. “And more civilian casualties,” she added, “on the third night, to make the ‘bandit’ attacks more convincing. Over two separate encounters: four shot, one slipped in the mud running away and broke his fool neck. Perhaps a dozen survivors, to bear witness for the trial.”

“‘And I alone am escaped to tell thee…’” Aramis quoted dryly, a high streak of winter sun painting his face in light and shade. “How kind of you.”

Madame snorted. “There would have been less if the first lot weren’t so rattled they couldn’t remember my husband’s name when asked.” She rolled her eyes. “We had to do it over until his name stuck.” She considered the little pile of gems and divided it neatly in two. “I’ll lay half at my grey gentleman’s door: framing my husband for a crime he didn’t commit was fun for me, I’ll admit, but he inspired the exercise.”

“Why?” Aramis asked, chin resting on his hand.

“He thought the Regiment walked too proudly on the earth. Sot though he was, Athos was respected: his fall would have humbled the soldiers, made them more biddable. A tool that balks in your hand is not a good tool.”

“Was that a tactic he used often,” he asked, “enforcing humility?”

Her acid-green eyes lifted, dropped.

She picked out another handful: “These died in the counter-strike, when the Musketeers learned of the deception. The last died of poison in his cell, before he could testify.”

Aramis curled the pearls, all of them, into the arch of his hand, the late afternoon sun through the slatted windows painting the skin warm amber as it moved in and out of the shadows. “That’s a lot of lives to kill one errant husband.”

“He didn’t die.”

 _“Tch._ Do you regret their deaths?”

“I’m not good at caring about other people,” she said baldly, scooping the pearls out of his hand and sliding them into a green velvet bag. “What do you think of that?”

“Several things,” he answered honestly. “Perhaps most cogent for today is that you were _sloppy.”_

“Hn.” The last of the pearls, white and indifferent-fawn, vanished into the velvet and she busied herself knotting the cord with sharp-nailed fingers. “I thought I would be so happy when I finally killed him, but instead, when I believed for a moment that I had finally ended him…”

“Yes?”

“Instead the world was diminished. The rage had sustained me for so long, fed my hunger and sharpened my aim, whatever was I to do with myself after? At the end of it all vengeance offered only emptiness; I felt so... weary.” She shrugged. “Then he came back: what would you.”

He smiled crookedly. “Musketeers don’t die easily?”

She smiled back, then reached to rub his wrist under a tied scrap of blue ribbon. “No. They don’t.”

 

**

 

_the chateau, an hour ago_

 

“...I’ll grant that it’s an unusual time of night to make a man’s acquaintance,” Aramis burbled.

“We’ve already met,” said the Savoyan Captain as they walked through the corridors. He eyed Athos. “Never be kind to a disconsolate drunk,” he said bitterly.

“I found that quite a fruitful life-choice, actually,” said Aramis, cool and bright. A sideways glare from Athos quelled him.

“Perhaps you should not greet un-looked for grace with ill favour,” said Athos, dry and impassive. “It smacks of churlishness.”

They walked a little more through the quiet halls.

“I like the Duchess,” Captain Edouard Filippo said, meditative. “I had my doubts about marrying into France, but I always liked the lady. I’d have said she’s good for us.”

“A prudent house-wife?”

“Something like that.” They were passing through the narrower halls, now: not decorated or smooth or wide, and lit by torches in sconces instead of good wax candles - where the servants dwelt, and the guards. Filippo tapped a dozing sentry on the shoulder and sent him trotting with a brief murmur in his ear. He walked on. “We’re small, Savoy, but there’s always someone picking at us. If it isn’t France it’s Spain, or another dust-up in the Piedmont, or the princelings cutting up rough or… _Mantua,”_ he said with disgust. “Best to have a prudent head running the place.”

Athos kept his silence.

“A couple of years back,” Filippo added, “I remember rousting out an assassin. One of our stable-hands recognised him on the road and gave information. _Tch._ He protested his innocence all the while we dragged him to the big house, but I _knew_ he was lying. For why? For I’d seen him years before that, doing a bang-up job carving up Duke Victor’s back.”

Aramis stopped. Athos reached up a hand to grip his shoulder, but paused, then dropped it.

“I knocked the man down, that night in the snow,” said Filippo, turning, “with a blow to the head.” His callused fingertips brushed Aramis’ temple, very lightly, where an old scar crawled inside his hair. The younger man stared back at him, impassive. “Thought I’d killed him, but we didn’t have time to check. Christ, that lot were hard to put down. Fought like demons, even the young ones.”

“Rousted from their sleep,” breathed Athos, cold as the northern ice, “taken unawares.”

“Everyone knows which pack of wolves does the French King’s dirty jobs,” Filippo said, impassive. “How many chances do _you_ take, with something precious? And Cluzet, the old Chancellor, he was a friend of mine, too.” But he turned on his heel and strode down the corridor, expecting them to follow.

“So I put the assassin down the hole, and about all I thought about it after that was assigning the guard detail that threw food and water down.”

“Sometimes they forgot,” Aramis said softly. Filippo turned. “The food,” Aramis clarified, “though it was only truly a trouble in the height of summer, when the rain-water dried up.”

“I am sorry for that.”

“It is forgotten,” said Aramis with automatic politeness. “You followed where your orders took you, I imagine.”

“How long did we hold you for?” Filippo asked.

“Long enough.”

“I don’t see any anger in you,” Filippo said, wonderingly.

“It’s been a tiring few days,” Aramis said flippantly, “and I’ve found little to profit, in anger. Are you asking if I have a quarrel with you? Be easy, Captain: I set it aside.”

“Some things demand an answer,” Filippo said, grey-haired, uncompromising.

“What good would anger _do?”_ Aramis asked, with a scrap of heat. “Does it put crops in the ground, or birth a baby? Does it guard your loved ones from the storm? Vengeance is the Lord’s prerogative: I lack His vision.” When he shut his eyes he could see Marsac, face gone old too soon, telling him that it had to end - he smelt the gunpowder and the blood. He saw Madame's clever fingers counting pearls in a dusty, sunlit attic. Aramis opened his eyes.

“You love Savoy, do you not?”

Filippo nodded.

“Do you have a family?” At another nod he went on. “Then for God’s sake, if you can be happy, _go home to your family.”_ Aramis stepped forward, and tilted his head. Gently, he kissed the older man on the forehead. “That is my answer.”

Infinitely weary, he turned away and ignored the man frantically scrubbing his forehead with the palm of his hand. No vengeance, and he didn’t know what justice was.

He opened a little door and stepped out into emptiness.

He stepped out. He -

It was dark, the louring shapes of gear and the occasional wagon obscured the view, but the great gates had swung open, lit by flambeaux on either side.

“No-one will stop you going,” he heard a man say. “I swear on my honour.”

Unwillingly, helpless, Aramis’ eyes turned to the oubliette, not far off, the grated lid removed, the hole a black mouth in a blacker night. Someone was whimpering.

“It’s empty,” the man said flatly. “If you had friends in here, they did their job and left already.”

“My friend puts the quarrel aside,” another said, soft and deadly as a silk garrotte. “Be aware that I do not.” Athos. He needed to get Athos out of here. He -

A hand touched his shoulder and he cringed away.

“Aramis,” Athos said, soft and urgent. “You need to walk.”

“I can’t.”

 _“You must.”_ Another touch, to his wrist, that he skittered away from; he realised with horror that he was nearing the pit and froze.

A huff of breath.

“Follow me,” his Captain commanded.

Aramis followed.

 

**

 

_now, the campsite_

 

“I am a practical man, _dominie,”_ said Aramis, half-smiling. “Move or die, not so?”

The old man stared at him, austere and silent.

Aramis’ eyes dropped. “No, it doesn’t go away. Even with my head cracked open again your voice stayed with me, whispering in my ear - does that please you?” He looked up and saw a flash of assent in Richelieu’s eyes. “Of course it does. Who doesn’t want to leave a mark on someone… and you told me so _many_ things.

“I think,” he added, meditatively, “that part of me will always be trapped in the dark, knowing that I am damned. As part of me clings to the rock wall, learning the endurance of dust, the way of the dove. And I live with that or I don’t, it is very simple. I’ve learned to love sunrises.”

“And you, _dominie?”_ he purred. “I ask if you can let things be. I know what you are in the dark, a feeble, trapped old man. Your shit stinks as mine, and you have carried both to the sewer-hole. Can you walk away from here, Armand, knowing that someone has seen you in filth, and disgrace, and yet breathes?”

“I am of course very grateful for your assistance,” said Richelieu smoothly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _if the first lot weren’t so rattled…_ \- I thought it odd in 1.01 that Whatsit was going around masked and then formally announcing himself as _Athos, of the King’s Musketeers_ and _nobody thought that odd_ until I realised that a lot of people have trouble remembering traumatic events. The fake Musketeer ‘bandits’ probably tried a bit more subtlety the first time, before finally throwing up their hands and stating "I, Athos, of the King's Musketeers," until it finally stuck. _Not that I approve in any way of these tactics._ Just my theory of how and why it played out that way. 
> 
> _‘And I alone am escaped to tell thee…’_ \- Aramis quotes the Book of Job, a recurrent phrase as yet another messenger arrives to tell Job, a good and godly man, that one more disaster has stricken his life. (Eventually he cracks, and asks why he should honour God, when God is clearly being a shit to him. He and his friends talk it out.)


	23. "The remains of the night."

_the campsite, now_

 

“I am of course very grateful for your assistance,” Richelieu assured Aramis.

Aramis studied him in the dimness of the pre-dawn, his own eyes bland, clear, and very innocent.

“Well then,” he said sweetly. “I thank you for your conversation and trust the remains of the night will pass pleasantly.” He levered himself to his feet, cautiously but smooth, and sketched a brief and elegant bow.

Richelieu watched him walk back to the fire, studiedly steady as a man who denies drunkenness, straight as a wand in plain and severe black. His eyes flicked to the side, where Athos leaned, still, against a dark tree. “How much of that did you hear?”

Athos removed the pipe from his mouth and blew a brief smoke ring. He watched it dissipate, face impassive, then considered the glowing bowl of his pipe. “All of it.” 

Richelieu stirred.

“It is best to retire,” Athos said dispassionately. “There is bedding available, if you desire it.”

**

His shirt was filthy, Aramis realised, thick with cold sweat and rank with it. He tugged it out of the waistband of his breeches and hauled it over his head, or tried - something was impeding him.

Swearing lightly in Italian he shifted his grip and tried again - bound, and trapped. He wasn’t going to panic, he’d been in worse spots, he -

“Easy there,” said Porthos. “Your doublet’s still on.” He steered Aramis to the ground with a hand on his shoulder blades and stared at the man’s curled back, covered in the fine black wool of a civilian’s doublet with just a hint of a laced shirt-collar smiling whitely at the top. He eased it off and the clammy cambric also, leaving them to lie in a disconsolate huddle beside the fire as he chafed Aramis’ limbs briskly with a rough cloth.

“Not drowned,” Aramis said, glassy-eyed, as Porthos moved to his torso, scrubbing and scrubbing until the glossy sweat was gone and his skin glowed pink with new blood.

“Shut up,” said Porthos, and manoeuvred him to sit so the faint breeze threw the fire’s smoke directly at them. Aramis coughed feebly, then again, and started shivering. He stared at Porthos accusingly and Porthos’ lips twitched as he draped a grey blanket over his knife-edged shoulder blades. “Almost over.”

“Is the duke away?” Aramis slurred, coughing again.

“I don’t know what that means,” d’Artagnan volunteered, crouching beside them and peering critically into Aramis’ face. “Do you think we can get some soup down him?”

“No,” said Porthos. And, _“Yes,_ Aramis, ‘the duke’s away,’ everything’s fine.”

“I promise to be shorter next time,” he answered meekly and tipped sideways. Porthos let him go, easing him down to the ground and dragging him to a proper bedroll. Aramis clutched at the rock they gave him, heated in the fire and wrapped with rags, curling around the warmth of it as they tucked another against his feet. “Porthos,” he said plaintively, “will you lie with me?”

“I am neither your mistress, nor your servant,” Porthos said levelly, “nor a grey blanket to pick up when you feel like a cuddle.”

D’Artagnan hissed beside him.

“Shit. Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.” Porthos bit his tongue. “Call it a joke, eh? A bad joke at a bad time.” Aramis stared at him without understanding.

“Why don’t you check on the horses,” d’Artagnan said. He must have been studying Athos, for his words, though soft-spoken, carried a gentle implacability. “Get some air. I’ve got this.” 

He settled beside Aramis, still shivering in the blankets, and gingerly touched the side of his face. “Hey now,” he said lightly, stroking his fingers into the man’s hair, “do you remember yet that time Constance fought a guy with a sword while you looked after the baby? You wouldn’t stop talking about her backhand stroke…”

**

Despite the offer of blankets Richelieu remained on his seat on the twisted tree-root, toying idly with the thing in his hands. He might one day feel the cold again but for now he did not truly notice it, wrapped as it was in his bones.

He watched impassive as the last quiet business of the camp wound down - a tour of the little horse-picket, doling out some last hot soup, men finding their beds… Without comment he watched Porthos crouch down beside Aramis and hold out his hand, hesitantly. The other spoke a few brief words as he reached out his own, and their fingers interlaced briefly before the big man kicked off his own boots and put aside his scaled and armoured beetle-shell of a jacket to crawl under the blanket himself. He wondered if the two men were lovers.

Athos, famed for his stoicism as well as his swordsmanship and drunkenness, remained standing, propped against the black tree and keeping silent watch. But even his head, in time, drooped into somnolence.

Richelieu opened his wrinkled hand and looked at the dagger in it, left forgotten by Aramis in the dirt. It was a pretty thing, the fine and narrow Toledo blade matched with a jewelled, enameled hilt. He had kept it on his desk and opened letters with it, once upon a time. Milady de Winter, that half-starved girl with a noblewoman’s diction and murder in her eyes had kept it in her hair after he gave it to her, turning his first gift into an assassin’s cocky _panache._ Well enough: let his servitors show a little pride so long as it wasn’t inconvenient...

The camp quietened. Birds, waking, sang to each other and chittered, and screamed, in the beginning of their dawn chorus. 

He watched as the boy turned in his sleep, hiding his face against the big man’s throat, who in turn wrapped a sleeping arm over his lower back. The blanket slipped, showing bare shoulders gone narrow and wiry. Clever boy. Sharp-tongued. He had his mother’s eyes. _If I have not charity I am become a sounding brass..._ A twitch of a shoulder blade: dreams were coming. 

He turned the dagger over in his hands.

 

**

 

_the chateau courtyard and stables, earlier in the night_

 

They sat in a wary circle in the stable-block where the Duke’s high-bred, high-stepping horses were kept. D’Artagnan was trying on his best charming smile at the pretty plump girl who had been sleeping with Jacques in the stables. She scowled back at him, and teased at the end of her thick brown braid. She had put down her pistol carefully beside her and did not seem to know what to do with her hands. Jacques sat next to her under a hanging lantern, the same height he’d been once, in the Musketeer’s garrison, but considerably broader, and near him, in the shadows, huddled the filthy old man they’d rescued.

“We’re not going to use the burning wagon trick to get out, I promise.”

Marie’s eyes widened and Porthos kicked d’Artagnan quietly.

“It’s fine,” Porthos soothed. “We’re not here to kick anything over. Besides, state of that courtyard, they’d shoot arrows at any kind of fuss just to be on the safe side.”

“The Duke just died,” volunteered Jacques. “That’s why th’re all busy. Was a cannon to mark his ending.”

_“Ahhh,”_ said Porthos, enlightened. “It was right clever of you to find that out, Jacques.”

“You can’t stay here,” Marie said, stubborn. “They’ll search, probably. And besides,” she added, with the air of playing a trump card, _“the smell is spooking the horses.”_

Porthos tsked softly. “Can we eel through those nice windows at the back?”

Her eyes flicked up and down. _“You_ couldn’t, even if the skinny ones made it, and then you’d all be split up and we’d be back where you started. And -” her lower lip wobbled but she lifted her round chin - “and I’m tired and I want to go to bed, so you’d better think of something quick.”

They heard then, outside in the main courtyard, a ponderous grinding like the mills of the gods as the great gates opened, and a rattle and clatter of hooves and wooden wheels. Porthos peered cautiously out through a crack in the doors. “A carriage,” he said softly, “with a full team. They look tired.”

“The horses will want looking after,” said d’Artagnan, eyes brightening.

“Or changing, so they can keep going.”

Their eyes met.

“The thing with the -”

_“Yeah…”_

It took some fussing, the thing with the carriage, and the gate, and the newly kidnapped coachman, sitting stiff in a corner of the stables with Marie poking a stick in the small of his back explaining that she was very sorry but she wanted to go to bed so he’d just have to sit tight a while longer. By the time they were ready to go the filthy old man had disappeared from his stool. They found him eventually, already sitting in the carriage and talking with young Jacques in low, melodious, _familiar_ tones. 

He was taking confession. Already Jacques’ troubled face had smoothed into something resembling peace. “Hell,” swore Porthos. “Richelieu?” He shot a furtive, wary glance at Marie in the corner, but she was occupied and it was as secret, really, as it ever must have been… so this was Aramis’ devil, hey? Best to move.

“When the time comes you’ll know what to do,” the old man said, all honey in his voice. He signed the cross on Jacques’ forehead and the stableman closed his eyes. “Go in peace, my son.” When he’d left, taking a ragged bundle with him, Richelieu looked at his rescuers pointedly. “If you’ve quite finished making the arrangements?” he asked, drawing a carriage-rug over himself.

A few minutes later they were outside, finally, swinging around the walls in a coach-and-six, already too far to hear the gunshot.

 

**

 

_the campside, mid-morning_

 

Porthos flicked his eyes open and growled at the sun. He’d overslept, it seemed, and the weather had chosen that day to be alarmingly bright and sunny. He heard the steps of d’Artagnan moving about the camp and a whickering of horses as they saw him, and Athos’ regular morning groan. Aramis was a solid weight on top of him.

He nudged his friend gently. “Here you, got to take a call of nature now.”

Aramis didn’t move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You are all such lovely people and I feel terrible about this.
> 
>  
> 
> // _... as he chafed Aramis’ limbs briskly with a rough cloth. “Not drowned,” Aramis said, glassy-eyed…_ \- possibly not the _best_ treatment for shock, but a traditional one.


	24. "A little sparrow."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last big push in the series, though there will be a few more entries and epilogues here and there. I started it over a year ago, to take my mind off rl worries, and the series has been a great friend to me since then.
> 
> As have you. 
> 
> I have truly delighted in all the readers who have kept up with this and given some amazing, thoughtful comments, and I’m glad to have met you.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Thimblerig.

_Paris, the Pont de la Tournelle, years ago_

 

The water of the Seine was black and certainly not clean. But deep, surely, and it would serve. Athos watched it, fascinated, as he leaned over the wooden rail. Distantly, he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth - not enough to take away the taste of vomit. A clot of refuse flowed along, a bundle of sticks, perhaps, with a red cloth cap caught on it. He followed it with his eyes then leaned further as it drifted out of sight. It would be easy to fall - not like he was choosing at all, really…

An abrupt hand on his collar yanked him back. “None of that, my friend.”

 _“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,”_ he growled. 

“So forward, this early in our acquaintance: how promising. But you are awash, _en un diluvio,_ and I regret that I must decline. I pray you, ask me again when you are sober.” 

“I don't know what to say to that,” Athos said blankly. He turned around the grip on his collar and beheld a slender dark man, very young and rather tall, who smiled at Athos with his eyes. 

“Perhaps it will come to you in the morning,” the young man said. He had lost his doublet somewhere and wore only sturdy leather breeches and boots and a light shirt with an appalling quantity of lace falling from his collar and wrists. It was a city style: louche and flamboyant. In addition he had wound a delicate silk stocking in a gaudy, bloody red rakishly about his neck and - what he seemed proudest of, for he turned so that it was in the light - adorned himself with a large, _magnificent,_ black eye. He had a well-used sword slung on his hip and smelled of perfume, and of sex. Athos’ hand reached up to touch his bruised eye, very lightly, and the smile reached the boy's mouth; he gripped Athos’ arm, just below the stiff weight of the new pauldron. 

“Shall we walk?” he inquired, linking arms. “I know more Catullus. There's a charming one about a little sparrow though a fine lady of my acquaintance - I shan't tell her name - tells me it may not _actually_ be a sparrow.” He stopped suddenly and whispered in Athos’ ear, “It might be a _metaphor.”_

He started walking again, stepping crisply so that the heels of his new boots resounded on the wooden boards, and towed Athos with him as the older man irritably picked at his unformed theories on Classical poetry. 

Athos balked when they reached the Île Saint-Louis, all covered with new and fussy buildings, but was manoeuvred, beguiled, and possibly seduced into turning around. “I'm waiting for a friend,” young Aramis confessed, “and so we must remain, heels rooted in the living earth. Or cutting a jig across the wood, if you prefer…”

“Then leave me be,” Athos growled, “I won't keep you.” Aramis’ laughter stopped when Athos threw up on his new boots, but he rallied and said, “Literary discourse is so flavoursome these days.” Flicking out a creamy handkerchief from his pocket, rich in scents of spice and amber, he wiped Athos’ mouth, gentle as a dry-nurse. His warm fingertips grazed against the scar on Athos’ upper lip and he paused, looking at Athos’ mouth, and his fingers, and he touched then the corner of his eye and the crows-feet there. He said carefully, “Things _may_ seem better in the morning.”

Athos shoved him. “Get out, get out, leave me _be_ damn you…”

Aramis staggered back, unoffended, and caught himself on the railing. He hitched himself up to sit on it and lifted his hands. “That was impertinent, I know. Peace, brother?”

Athos glared at him, bristling like an angry cat.

 _”And such of you as love beauty, my girl’s sparrow is dead,”_ Aramis quoted softly, _”whom she loved more than her eyes… Now he goes down the shadowy road, from which they say no one returns...”_ He blinked slowly. “The morning might be worse. Probably worse, I think, given your likely hangover. If your feelings remain unchanged in the morning I shall not stand in your way, I swear it.”

 _“Hoy, Aramis,”_ came a distant voice. _“Watch you don’t fall!”_

The boy swung himself around on the rail, beaming, and waved the red stocking like a victory flag, shouting, _“Hoy back, Porthos! Come meet my new friend!”_

 

**

 

_the campsite, high noon_

 

Aramis lay in the centre of the camp, covered in a blanket, lying very still near the ring of stones and ash where a fire had once burned. Sitting quietly, with his feet tucked up under him and his lean brown hands on his knees, d’Artagnan peered thoughtfully at his peaceful face.

Athos looked up from his seat on a twisted tree root and scowled. “If you’re quite done.”

In a whisper, so hoarse and carrying that it might as well be a shout, d’Artagnan answered, “I thought I saw an eyelash flicker.”

Lying still, his eyes shut tight, Aramis said, creakily, “You’re like a cat waiting to be fed.” He winced. “How much did I drink last night.”

“Nothing.”

Aramis threw a bare forearm over his eyes and muttered, “Christ.”

“If you don’t wake up soon, you’ll miss the goodbye,” d’Artagnan said blandly.

The forearm moved slightly, and a suspicious black eye showed itself. “Who’s going where?”

“I’m escorting our _guest_ back to France. You three are travelling on to Mantua: it seemed more efficient that way.”

Giving up on sleep, Aramis levered himself awkwardly upright, letting the blanket fall away as he sat on the bedroll. He blinked groggily, his hair rumpled as the feathers of a bird in molt, and looked around.

A camp they were in, set amongst fir trees, in chill weather but the high noon sun was very bright. Athos to the side scowled over a pile of black cloth in his lap, and swore suddenly as the needle he was using to sew buttons stuck him in the finger. Sighing he tucked it in his mouth, then looked up, saw Aramis, and froze. Aramis grinned at him - domestic chores had never been one of Athos’ strengths. Oddly, it was then that Athos blushed.

To the side Porthos worked on horses, checking jingling bridles and matter-of-factly tightening girths. He saw Aramis awake and grinned also, then crouched to boost into a saddle -

“The Cardinal,” Aramis said blankly. “The Cardinal is on a horse.”

“Yes,” said d’Artagnan. He yawned into the sunlight. “He’s going back to France.” As they watched, Porthos tucked a nondescript cloak about Cardinal Richelieu and pulled up a hood. Then he nodded peremptorily to d’Artagnan.

Something stirred under Aramis’ hand in the dirt: a small fine stiletto dagger, of good steel with a daintily ornamented hilt. He frowned at it, then asked, mildly, “If it wouldn’t trouble you, and please forgive my grogginess, but why are we going to Mantua?”

“Athos said it was best to keep you moving,” the boy said placidly, smoothly rising to his feet. “Besides,” he said, and looked around suspiciously before mouthing the words: _“Agnes is there._ Maybe there. And you’re our best bet for finding her and providing, you know, pastoral care.”

“At some point,” Aramis said slowly, “that may make sense to me.” He squinted balefully at the sun.

“It will,” answered d’Artagnan softly. “And when it does, don’t fret. _We’ve got you._ Alright?”

He offered his hand and Aramis took it. “Journey with God -” 

Lightly, Aramis finished the blessing, “ - and end with Him also.”

Yawning, he watched them go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Spero tibi placet._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> // _“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo”_ \- no, I'm not translating this. Ah… I think from context it was the Classical Latin Poet version of locker-room trash talk. It's still filthy. (But also Catullus.)
> 
> // _as he leaned over the wooden rail_ \- as far as I can tell, the Pont de la Tournelle was built of wood in 1625. I couldn’t find any period pictures of the right date though, sorry. (It may not have a rail.)
> 
> // Aramis is thinking of Catullus 2, “Tears for Lesbia’s Sparrow” which I'm told might be a sexual allegory, and later Catullus 3, “The Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow”. There's a link to the poems in translation here, if you want to see: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Catullus.htm#anchor_Toc531846731
> 
> // _It was a city style: louche and flamboyant_ \- Ah… in 17th century France scent and lace had a different range of connotations than now, and _I have money_ and _I’m so good at what I do there’s no chance my pretty cuffs are getting dirty_ were two strong ones. Baby!Aramis found that when he wore a more butch style he generally came across as a kid playing dress-up in his dad’s boots, so he tended to go hard the other way. And, uh, he didn’t really *mind* the occasional need to ~~beat the tar out of~~ fight a duel with some Red Guard or whoever who wanted to comment disparagingly on his personal style. That was more of a bonus, really. (Aramis mellowed _considerably_ after becoming friends with Porthos and Athos.)


	25. Epilogue: "Twice in one day."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just felt like something really fluffy. Written for Anathema Device

"Aramis, hold still a moment."

Aramis reined in his gelding as Athos rode up beside him, looking at the man curiously. Athos gestured ahead with one gloved forefinger and, as Aramis turned to see, leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

Aramis blinked, touching his cheek lightly as he watched Athos move into a trot. "What was that for?"

Porthos shrugged and yawned. "Guess he just felt like it. Is it bothering you?"

"I wouldn't say that," Aramis said, failing to hide his smile. "But twice in one day... Have I been ill?" he asked cautiously, looking at the strange gelding he was riding. It flicked a peaceful ear.

"You had a conk on the head. Sometimes you're a bit blank in the mornings." Porthos squinted up at the sky. "Early afternoons. That. There's nothing to worry over today, we're just riding, so no need to fret."

Nodding cautiously, Aramis took up his reins.

"Hey, Aramis," Porthos said easily. "Hold still a moment..."


End file.
